When we write history, it tends to be tidy and led by great men. In real time, it’s messy but still astonishing. Last weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who leads a private army called the Wagner Group, attempted what many have called a coup against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Technically, it failed. He landed in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, pledged to march to Moscow, and then turned around. Nothing about this series of events suggests expert planning or high competence. Prigozhin is a former prisoner and a former hotdog salesman. Staff writer Tom Nichols puts him in a league with “gangsters” and “clowns.”

But sometimes gangsters and clowns are the ones who shake up the established order. Prigozhin’s march lasted barely 48 hours, yet it seems to have changed the conversation about Russia. Putin appears shaken and, as staff writer Anne Applebaum put it, “panicky.” His response to such a direct threat has been surprisingly tentative. The mutiny may have technically failed, but it left some revolutionary thoughts in people’s minds. Putin is not, in fact, invulnerable. Which means Russians might have a choice.

In this episode, Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols explain this week’s wild turn of events in Russia and the door those events opened.

“We’ve lived with Putin for 23 years. We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever, and that he reigned supreme,” Nichols says about this remarkable moment. “That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Over the weekend, something wild happened in Russia. A man named Yevgeny Prigozhin seemed to start a rebellion. His private army, the Wagner Group, fights alongside Russian troops in Ukraine. But this weekend they turned their guns against Russia itself. They took over a major southern city called Rostov-on-Don and then pledged to march on Moscow, making it hundreds of miles before turning around.

Was this a mutiny? Was it a failed coup? People are debating Prigozhin’s motives and whether he thought he had internal support. Zooming out, though, what it means is that one man—a guy who was in prison, then became a hotdog salesman, and then rose up to become a loyal protégé of President Vladimir Putin—turned on Putin, humiliated him, and somehow survived. We’ve been told that Prigozhin is now in Belarus. Anyway, the news is moving quickly and there’s been lots of speculation. Two people I trust to ground us are Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols.

So Tom, the past week’s events in Russia have been called a coup and a mutiny; however, you refer to it as a falling-0out among gangsters. What did you mean by that?

Tom Nichols: Well, the problem is that the Russian state is a conglomeration of power players who are much like the five families—you know, in the old Godfather movie—these are mobsters, and Putin is the gangster in chief. But he has capos under him. And there was some issue there about territory and control with Prigozhin and his forces, who were going to be pulled in under another one of Putin’s cronies, the minister of defense.

And, um, things got outta control.

Rosin: So how does Prigozhin fit into that picture? Sort of where is he in the gangster taxonomy?

Nichols: Well, he’s got his own crew. He’s a powerful captain. He’s got his own army. He has, you know, 25,000 well-armed, battle-hardened men who answer to him. And another capo was threatening to take that away from him, and he wasn’t going to stand for that.

Rosin: So you see it less as a geopolitical battle than just an internal fight for power between two people?

Nichols: People have multiple motivations for doing things. I think a lot of what Prigozhin tapped into is real. People are, both in the military and back home, fed up with the way that the guys in Moscow have run this war and taken immense casualties and pretty much gotten nowhere. I mean, that’s a real thing.

It’s a real problem, but it’s also in part a struggle for power among these players. So there are multiple things going on here and, and not all of them, I think, are clear to us over here right now.

Rosin: Right. So Anne, looking towards the real motives that Tom brought up, Prigozhin has for a long time been openly criticizing the war in Ukraine and the motives for the war in Ukraine. What types of things has he been saying, and why do you think they struck a chord?

Anne Applebaum: For the last several weeks and months, really, Prigozhin has been blaming the leaders of the army, the leaders of the military, for failing to provide leadership, failing to provide equipment. I mean, he’s focused in particular on the minister of defense, [Sergei] Shoigu and the army chief of the general staff.

And he talks about them using very insulting language. He talks about Shoigu, you know, living a luxury life. And [Valery] Gerasimov being a paranoid, crazy person who shouts at people. These are very personal anecdotal descriptions of them. Um, which may well ring a bell among people around them as something that’s true.

More recently, and right before his strange ride to Moscow, he came out with a much more substantive critique. In other words, he began talking about the causes of the war itself. He said, well, the war was—the only reason we’re fighting this war is because Shoigu wants to advance. He wants to be a marshal. You know, he wants a better rank.

And because lots of people in Moscow were making money off of the 2014 occupations of Ukraine territories in the east that they gained at that time, and they want more. They got greedy and wanted more.

In other words, it’s not a war for empire. It’s not about the glory of Russia. It’s not about NATO. It’s not about any of the things that Putin has said. It’s just about greedy people wanting more. The appeal of this narrative is that it’s very comfortable for Russians to hear that there’s a reason why they’re failing. You know that there are specific people to blame.

Rosin: And you mean failing in the war in Ukraine?

Applebaum: I mean failing in the war in Ukraine in that they were supposed to conquer the country in three days and that didn’t happen. There’s been massive casualties [and] losses of equipment. It may also have an echo among people who want someone to blame for general misery. The economy hasn’t been going well for a while. People can see corruption all around them. It’s not like it’s a big secret. And pinning it on specific people saying these guys are responsible for failure might be something that a lot of Russians want to hear.

Rosin: Yeah. I can see as you guys are talking how it can be both a gangster war and something that is sincere and taps into a true vein of discontent. Like, it can be both of those things at the same time. Now, this question is for either of you: We are getting news trickling out this week about the possibility that Prigozhin had some kind of support in the Russian military. If that’s true, and I know that’s a big if, what does that change about how we should understand the situation?

Applebaum: So I assumed he had some kind of support in the military, both because of the way he behaved in Rostov-on-Don, where he seemed chummy with the generals at the head of the Southern Military District and where his soldiers were tolerated and almost welcomed in the city. He couldn’t have done that and he couldn’t have kept going without somebody being on his side. And it seems like he expected more, or he thought there would be more support, so that doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, the precise names of who it was and what their motives were, I don’t think we really know that yet, although there have been concrete names mentioned in the press. But he clearly expected something more to happen.

Nichols: Yeah, I agree with Anne. I don’t think you march on Rostov-on-Don and then turn north toward Moscow and think that you’re on your own. There may have been some specific people that he had spoken to, but I think there was also a larger expectation—because remember, Prigozhin’s a pretty arrogant guy, and there is a lot of discontent in the Russian military—that he was just expecting that there would be units that he would just pick up along the way or that around Moscow would get word of this and say: We’re on your side.

And I’ve been curious about Putin’s tentativeness, his procrastination and all this, and I wonder, given these reports, whether he had concerns himself about which units—if he ordered an attack or if he wanted to do something more demonstrative—which units would actually obey his orders or which units would actually stay with him or join the mutiny if they were forced to make a choice. But again, we can’t know that for sure. But it certainly makes a lot of sense that Prigozhin wasn’t going to do this without having spoken to somebody in Moscow and in Rostov-on-Don.

Rosin: Right. So the reason this continues to be a live issue is because it matters who supported him. It matters because it speaks to the degree of insecurity on Putin’s side, and it speaks to sort of how strong the discontent is.

Nichols: It matters because it says that the Russian government and the Russian high command have serious stresses and cracks that are now obvious that had been either smaller early on and hidden, or that had somehow been papered over. But the idea that somehow Putin is completely in charge and invulnerable to challenges—that’s gone.

Rosin: Yeah, and that’s important. Now, Anne, if Prigozhin, as you say, was aiming for something bigger and it didn’t quite work out or technically failed, as we talk about it we still have to grapple with what happened on the other side, which is that he arrived in a Russian city and the citizens kind of shrugged. What did that tell you?

Applebaum: So I thought that was quite significant. We’ve all read many times these somber analyses of so-called polling data from Russia saying that people support Putin. What this showed was that the citizens of Rostov-on-Don weren’t particularly bothered that a brutal warlord showed up in the city, said he wanted to change some things and get them done.

Maybe he was going to go and take Putin’s people down. Maybe he was going to go and take Putin himself down. And they applauded him and they were taking selfies with him. And they started chanting when the Wagner Group was pulling out of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday evening—they were chanting, “Wagner, Wagner” in the streets.

That shows that the support for Putin is pretty weak. It’s passive. He’s the guy there and we don’t see any alternatives, but the instant an alternative emerges, well, you know, that might be interesting. I mean, Prigozhin is not exactly an attractive figure, but maybe from their point of view, he’s more honest; he seems more effective.

And as I said in the beginning, he’s offering them an explanation that’s psychologically comfortable. Why is this war going so badly? Why haven’t we won? Why is everything so corrupt? Why is the army so dysfunctional? Why are so many people dying?

Okay, well he just gave us a reason. The reason is because there are these corrupt generals in charge and they’re doing a bad job. And that’s something that people would like to hear. They want an explanation for this strange war that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and is only causing damage.

Rosin: Now, Tom, in the aftermath of all of this, Putin has given a statement talking about treason, not naming Prigozhin explicitly. And given what Anne just said, and what you just said about how strong a challenge this actually is, what is this hesitation about? I mean, this whole incident could have ended with Prigozhin dead, but instead he’s in Belarus, or we think he’s in Belarus. And he’s alive, or we think he’s alive.

Nichols: I think both of them are feeling about to figure out who their allies are and they’re both making appeals to society that are meant to isolate. In Putin’s case, he’s just isolating Prigozhin without naming him, saying: Hey, all you heavily armed crack commando mercenary guys, I understand that you were led astray. And it’s okay to come home.

So when he talks about traitors, I mean, this isn’t Stalinism. He’s not saying, Oh, that whole unit, they’re all dead. He’s trying to plant internal divisions there. As is Prigozhin, who has been really careful to say, Look, I’m not trying to overthrow the president. I’m not trying to overthrow the government. But these two guys at the top, Shoigu and Gerasimov, the minister of defense and the chief of the general staff, they gotta go. And if I have to march to Moscow to get them out, then that’s what I’m going to do.

So they’re both being very careful not to proliferate more enemies in society or among the other elites than they need to. Now, for Prigozhin, that makes sense. For Putin, that’s very revealing. I mean, he’s the president of the country and here he is, kind of tiptoeing around, trying not to aggravate thousands of armed men who were part of a mutiny. So while they’re both doing the same thing, I think it’s really revealing that one of them happens to be the president of the country.

Rosin: Yeah, and as much as I understand the iconography of Putin is important—who’s weak, who’s strong—as a unit of analysis. Strong man, shirtless on a horse, does not necessarily wanna lose out to a hotdog-salesman ex-prisoner.

Nichols: Right. He actually appeared in public the first two times—he looked awful; I mean, it looked like a bunker video—where he is standing in front of a desk and he’s kind of raging to the camera. He finally came out again with all of the pomp and all the trappings of his office, coming down the big staircase and the honor guard snapping to attention.

And addressing the troops, the officers, he said something really interesting. He said: You prevented a civil war. Which is not true. Nobody actually did that. It’s certainly not true that the army put down a civil war in the offing. Nothing like that happened, and to make that appeal is to try to pull the military closer to the president, to say: You’re my heroes. I know you saved the country and you will keep saving the country. Which to me was a really striking thing to do. Again, as you and everybody’s been pointing out, Prigozhin is still—at least we think—still alive and running around issuing statements.

Rosin: So what comes next? After the break, we speculate. But with restraint.

[BREAK]

Rosin: Now, because both of you have studied the situation so closely, my natural temptation is to lob a lot of future-prediction questions at you. Like, what does this mean for Ukraine and what does the weakened Putin mean for a global order? Is it just too hard to speculate?

Applebaum: I feel there are so many missing pieces of this story and so many oddities about it that don’t add up. I would need to know more before I would be confident about telling you that, you know, at 7 o’clock on September the first, X or Y will happen next. Almost everything we know about this story, I mean, it’s like the shadows on Plato’s Cave, you know? We’re seeing the reflections of activities. There are these Russian military bloggers who you have to follow in order to understand any of this. And of course, they’re telling the story from their point of view.

State television is telling it from Putin’s propaganda point of view. It’s not as if we have a reliable source of information who will lay it out for us and give us the facts. Even the story as we’re speaking. I mean, this may even change before this podcast comes out, but as we’re speaking, we’ve been told by several very unreliable people that Prigozhin is in Belarus,—by the Russian spokesman and by the Belarussian.

And, you know, those people have lied so many times that until I see a photograph of Prigozhin, I don’t believe it. He’s gotta have a photograph of him in Minsk and I need to know that it’s not Photoshopped. And then I’m sure it’s true. So that’s why I think it’s very hard to—you don’t wanna make too many sweeping conclusions yet.

I mean, we know what we saw on Saturday. And what we saw on Saturday was a mutiny, and it did demonstrate far more weakness in the state and unpreparedness than anybody was certain was there. We know that Putin was the first to start using the language of civil war. He did it on Saturday morning, and so that indicates that he at least thinks something very serious was happening.

Which is an indication, again, that there may be more to the story to come, but making clear predictions about what will happen, certainly to the war in Ukraine—I mean, I’m not sure yet that it has affected the war in Ukraine. Maybe it will affect Russian troop morale. Maybe it lets us know that there will be more trouble with the military command.

But it hasn’t had a specific effect on the ground yet that we can see. And until that happens, I’m just reluctant to make too many predictions.

Nichols: Yeah, I think when it comes to the war in Ukraine, too many people have had this idea that all the Russian forces are going to stop and say, No, wait. We’re not going to fight until we get this sorted out. Um, they’re still fighting. The situation at the front is the situation at the front, and that doesn’t really change because of this.

So what Ukraine has to do, and the support we need to give them—that doesn’t change … the reluctance to prognosticate. Well, you know, there were a lot of people who said the Soviet Union couldn’t fall. People that study Russia have figured out that you can get burned on these predictions, in part because when you’re predicting stuff, you tend to be predicting the behavior of institutions writ large because you know how they operate. This is all contingent on individuals, and trying to predict the behavior of these kind of Mafia-like characters is really difficult to do, because that could all change in a moment when they decide to shift alliances or one of them runs afoul of another of them.

So I’m with Anne here. I don’t want to get too detailed about what’s going to happen next week … This definitely wounded Putin and he is in a different situation than he was.

I don’t think there’s any going back to sort of pre-June in Russian politics right now.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean that’s important enough. As you were talking, Tom, I was thinking if you write the histories of a lot of mutinies and coups, they do start with an action by someone who seems like a gangster and seems to be behaving in a ridiculous way. Like, coups can start in ridiculous ways.

Applebaum: It is also true that coups and mutinies that don’t succeed can have an impact on politics too. And there’s some famous examples from Russian history: There’s a revolution that doesn’t succeed in 1905, but it had a profound impact on the state. It forced the czar, Nicholas, to pass a constitution and create a Duma—a Parliament.

It very much changed the way that he was perceived. And then in the run-up to the Russian Revolution in 1917, there were also a number of strikes and moments, you know, and other, different kinds of events that happened. And some of them were unsuccessful. The Bolsheviks had a march that was unsuccessful, but ultimately there was a revolution.

They did take power. And those earlier events, you know, looked retrospectively more important than they may have seemed at the time. And it’s too early to say whether that’s what this is. But it’s clearly the case though that a failed event can have political consequences even beyond those of the immediate moment.

Nichols: Right. The 1991 coup was a complete clown show, and it failed. The guy that was actually was supposed to step in as president and replace Gorbachev was, like, drunk all the time, and the whole thing was just a complete mess. But it had a profound impact on the final days of the Soviet Union and on the collapse of the Soviet empire and the emergence of the countries of the post-Soviet space. Most mutinies and coups don’t succeed, but as Anne pointed out, they can have an immense impact just because they happened at all.

Rosin: Now all I wanna do is ask you guys to speculate, because now it’s very interesting. Now I’m thinking: Okay, so which directions does it go? You know, Is there a future for Prigozhin? Is he making a play to replace Putin one day? Are there other Prigozhins out there? I mean, are any of those answerable questions?

Applebaum: I think you can talk about options. Again, you can look at the past. It seems to me, in the case of Putin, one possibility is: Now that there’s been a challenge that didn’t succeed but that revealed weakness, will there be more challenges? And so you might say, Well, that’s clearly now an option in a way that it wasn’t before last week.

You could also guess that Putin might now try another crackdown. What do leaders do who have been weakened? Leaders like him. Dictators. Well, one of the things they do is they lash out and they try and reestablish their preeminence or their dominance. And they do that by arresting people or purging people. I don’t know what that would be in the case of modern Russia. Cutting off the internet? Or shutting the borders? I mean, you can sort of imagine scenarios, because he will now need to make up for the fact that he’s seen to be weaker. And I’m not saying either one of those will happen, but those are things that, based on how these things have played out in other times in other places, you can guess at.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, as you look at this, I’m trying to put myself in your head. You’re sort of looking at the dictator’s playbook, watching how he rewrites the story of what just happened in real time and trying to see what other dictators would do or have done in the past. Is that how you track these events?

Applebaum: Yes. And I’m also thinking of Russian history. In the history of the Soviet Communist Party, every time there was a failure or a disaster, they would try to re-up the ideology and sort of restart the project and crack down. It goes in waves, all the way from 1917 up to 1991. And you can imagine a similar pattern working itself out here, yes.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I feel like I’m going back to the toolbox of the old-school Sovietology that I learned back in the 1980s. And so, rather than prognosticate, I’ll just say the things I’m looking for. I’m literally now looking at videos of who’s sitting next to whom at these meetings. Who’s still in. Who might be out.

I’m looking for personnel changes. Does the minister of defense survive? Does the chief of the general staff get replaced? This now becomes kind of a game of trying to follow all of these people and their portfolios as some kind of indicator of what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

Rosin: Tom, what’s the larger through line you’re tracking? You’re tracking the chess pieces—who’s going here and who’s falling off the board—but what’s the bigger story?

Nichols: I think it’s going to be: Is Putin trying to shore up his power base or is there an alternative base forming against him? I think that’s the thing to watch. You know, we’ve lived with Putin for 23 years seeming to be [invincible], except for when he first arrived in power and when he had a serious challenge around 2011.

We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever. And that he reigns supreme. That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?

Because until now he has made sure that there were no alternatives to him. And I think what Prigozhin did was to say, well, there could be at least some alternative. Maybe not good ones. But you can in fact oppose this guy and criticize his team and get away with it.

Rosin: Yeah. Basically, Russians, you might have a choice. That’s as much as we can say.

Nichols: Not a great choice, but a choice somewhere.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, this may be a strange way to put it, but is there a sense that this incident exposes how alone, or kind of lost in his own head, Putin is? He conceived of the war in isolation. The military was never necessarily enthusiastic. Now we have a vision of him not exactly sure who his allies are and who’s on his team, and I just got this vision of: dictator alone.

Applebaum: So we’ve had intimations of that for a couple of years now. In fact, Prigozhin himself has hinted that Putin doesn’t really know what’s going on [and] they’re lying to him. And many others have said that too. So we’ve already had this idea that he doesn’t really know what’s going on on the battlefield. And this incident did make it seem like he also didn’t really know what was going on at home.

I mean, for someone who’s now saying they had foreknowledge of this, he didn’t react like somebody who was confident of the outcome. The speech he gave on Saturday morning was panicky. It was about the civil war in 1917 and “our nation is at stake.”

He didn’t give off the impression of someone who was staying in charge. And so there very much is the impression that he somehow lives in this by himself, surrounded by security guards in some bunker. And that feels more and more like an accurate description of his life.

Rosin: Yeah. Well, I guess a lot more to come this week. This year. For a while. But thank you both for helping us understand what just happened.

Applebaum: Thanks.

Nichols: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic. Engineering is by Rob Smerciak. Fact-checking by Yvonne Kim. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, A. C. Valdez, and Vann Newkirk. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The Supreme Court released a somewhat surprising—and pretty important—decision yesterday. Should it change the way we think about the Court? Before we get into it, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The comic strip that explains the evolution of American parenting The new Republican litmus test is very dangerous. Stop firing your friends.

Conservative, Not MAGA

It’s good to be back at The Daily! I spent a lot of time last year writing about candidates trafficking in election denial. Looming above all of my coverage was a case at the Supreme Court that would determine the future of election law and, by extension, American democracy. That case, Moore v. Harper, was decided yesterday. I talked with my colleague Russell Berman, a staff writer on our Politics team, about what the decision means, and whether it shifts the dominant narrative about the Roberts Court.

Elaine Godfrey: Russell! I’m so glad we get to talk about this. Yesterday was a big SCOTUS day. In a 6–3 vote, the Court rejected the independent state legislature theory in a case called Moore v. Harper. What is that theory—and why were people so anxious about it?

Russell Berman: The theory basically interprets the Constitution as giving near-total authority over elections to state legislatures, over and above state courts, election administrators, secretaries of state, and even governors. What this means in practice is that because Republicans have overwhelming majorities in many of the closest presidential swing states, including Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina, the adoption of this theory by the Supreme Court would have allowed GOP lawmakers in those states to overrule or simply ignore election decisions they didn’t agree with.

Democrats believed that Republicans would then have used that power to overturn close elections in 2024, just like former President Donald Trump tried to get his allies to do in 2020.

Elaine: Thanks to Trump, there were all kinds of Republicans denying the outcome of the 2020 election, as well as sowing doubt ahead of the midterms. A lot of those candidates lost in the midterms, though, including Kari Lake in Arizona. Is this SCOTUS decision the final coda on the election-denial fight? Are we finally done with that stuff now?

Russell: Not so fast, Elaine. As Rick Hasen points out at Slate, the Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t totally quash the opportunity for election-related shenanigans in the courts. Although the Court declined to give state legislatures unfettered power over elections, it simultaneously warned state courts that federal courts—including the Supreme Court—could still overrule them on cases involving federal elections. That’s what happened in Bush v. Gore, when a conservative majority on the Supreme Court essentially decided the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. And let’s say that in 2024, the Democratic-controlled state supreme court in Pennsylvania issues a ruling on a big election case in favor of Joe Biden. The Court’s decision today served as a reminder that its members could still have the final say.

Elaine: Two Trump-appointed justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, joined three liberal justices in the majority decision in this case. That felt surprising to me. Was it to you?

Russell: Not entirely. Although both Kavanaugh and Barrett joined the majority overruling Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs abortion decision last year, they have not always joined what is now the Court’s far-right wing in election cases: Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, who all dissented from yesterday’s decision. Kavanaugh voted with the majority earlier this month in upholding a key part of the Voting Rights Act, while Barrett joined the dissent.

Elaine: So what does this mean for our understanding of the Court at this moment? Is it more liberal-leaning than Dobbs might have suggested?

Russell: It’s a stretch to call it more liberal. But these decisions suggest that there is a limit to the Court’s rightward shift of the past several years. Chief Justice Roberts in particular continues to resist efforts to upend decades of judicial precedent, and he has had some success in persuading newer justices like Kavanaugh and Barrett to join him. If anything, the Court’s decisions over the past few years suggest it’s conservative but not MAGA. Its ruling in Dobbs was a victory for conservatives, but Trump’s own commitment to the anti-abortion cause has wavered. And in addition to this state-legislature ruling, the Court ruled against Trump several times toward the end of his presidency—and, of course, rejected him in his Hail Mary bid to overturn his defeat in 2020.

Elaine: So you’re saying that Democrats shouldn’t start buying those celebrity prayer candles with Roberts’s face on them?

Russell: Only if they also start buying candles with Mitch McConnell’s face on them. Roberts is playing a role similar to the one McConnell has played in the Senate over the past few years. Roberts either wrote or joined several opinions that have been devastating to liberal causes. He’s helped to eviscerate Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, dramatically expand the scope of the Second Amendment, and limit Congress’s ability to enact campaign-finance regulations. But he’s obviously attuned to public attitudes toward the Court and to that end has tried, with limited success, to restrain the most aggressive impulses of his more ideological colleagues.

Elaine: There are a few other really important cases coming down the pike, including one about college affirmative-action programs and another related to President Joe Biden canceling student debt. If there’s a limit to the Court’s rightward shift, does that tell us anything about how these cases will go? Should progressives plan to be happy?

Russell: Probably not. If the pattern of recent years holds, the relief that progressives are experiencing following their victories in this case and in the voting-rights decision will give way to more anger and disappointment when the Court releases its final opinions of the term. Most legal observers expect the Court to deal a fatal blow to affirmative action after a series of decisions that limited its use in college admissions. And they also believe the Court will rule against President Joe Biden’s effort to unilaterally forgive up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers.

Related:

The Roberts Court draws a line. The Court eviscerates the independent state legislature theory.

Today’s News

Wildfire smoke from Canada has blanketed large portions of the United States, leading more than a dozen states to issue air-quality alerts. Former President Trump countersued E. Jean Carroll for defamation after being found liable for sexually abusing her. Carroll’s attorney said that Trump’s counterclaim is “nothing more than his latest effort to delay accountability.” Daniel Penny pleaded not guilty in the killing of Jordan Neely on the New York City subway after being indicted on counts of second-degree manslaughter and negligent homicide.

Evening Read

(Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.)

The Harry and Meghan Podcasts We’ll Never Get to Hear

By Caitlin Flanagan

The Meghan Markle and Prince Harry content farm is facing contradictory supply and demand challenges. On the one hand, Netflix is reportedly threatening that the couple had better come up with some more shows, or $51 million comes off the table. On the other, Spotify has found that the 12 episodes of Markle’s podcast, Archetypes, were 10 episodes too many (the Serena Williams and Mariah Carey interviews were blockbusters, but after that: crickets). And—in a mutual decision! mutual!—it has cut the couple loose from their $20 million deal. Together, the news stories formed a classic example of the macroeconomic principle of too much, too little, too late.

In rapid response to the Netflix needling came word that the couple was working on a possible prequel to Great Expectations, centered on the life of a young Miss Havisham. It was exactly the kind of project you could imagine them dreaming up and an improvement, perhaps, on one of Harry’s earlier pitches, “Jude the Obscure, but in Vegas.”

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P.S.

I am turning the big 3-0 this summer, and the milestone has triggered a mixture of all the usual emotions associated with aging: relief at having survived this long, despite my clumsiness and bad sense of direction; anxiety about not having accomplished enough; and horror at the fact that I’m edging toward the end of it all. You know, normal stuff. I feel happy but also in need of closure, some sort of commemoration of this moment. To that end, I’m seeking the wisdom of our (older-than-30) readers: What are the best books, articles, poems, or podcasts you might recommend to someone on the precipice of their 30s? What advice would you like to go back and tell your 29-year-old self? I want to hear it all! Email egodfrey@theatlantic.com.

— Elaine

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

The Meghan Markle and Prince Harry content farm is facing contradictory supply and demand challenges. On the one hand, Netflix is reportedly threatening that the couple had better come up with some more shows, or $51 million comes off the table. On the other, Spotify has found that the 12 episodes of Markle’s podcast, Archetypes, were 10 episodes too many (the Serena Williams and Mariah Carey interviews were blockbusters, but after that: crickets). And—in a mutual decision! mutual!—it has cut the couple loose from their $20 million deal. Together, the news stories formed a classic example of the macroeconomic principle of too much, too little, too late.

In rapid response to the Netflix needling came word that the couple was working on a possible prequel to Great Expectations, centered on the life of a young Miss Havisham. It was exactly the kind of project you could imagine them dreaming up and an improvement, perhaps, on one of Harry’s earlier pitches, “Jude the Obscure, but in Vegas.”

We learned, too, of a private humiliation: Markle had composed a heartfelt and deeply personal letter inviting Taylor Swift on her show, but received only a rejection from her staff. News also broke of some ideas for podcasts that Harry was reportedly considering making, including talking with the pope about “religion,” and with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump about their childhood.

A list of other possible subjects, its authenticity not confirmed, was leaked by the couple or possibly by the Prince and Princess of Wales, or perhaps it was found at the end of a California writer’s garden. Here they are:

Meghan’s Content Ideas

Armed Vulnerability: How 24-Hour Private Security Can Make You More Open to Feelings

Two Girls Talking: Meghan and Gwyneth Get Real About Italian Vogue

SCOTUS SHOT CLOCK: Alan Dershowitz, Gloria Allred, and Dua Lipa Explain Why Justice Brandeis Believed in the ‘Right to Be Let Alone’

Suits Reunion, Part 1

This Candle Smells Like My Prenup

Centering Yourself When Others Are Centered on You: Finding Peace on the Red Carpet

Suits Reunion, Part 2, with Hoda Kotb

The Grandmother Was Extra

Red Scare Booked Taylor Swift, and I’m Not Taking Calls

He Spends Two Days on the Witness Stand to Talk About … Chelsy Davy?

Hoda Kotb Canceled. Unbelievable.

What Mothers of Ordinary Children Might Feel: A Four-Part Scientific Investigation

Amy Schumer (scheduling conflict)

SCOTUS SHOT CLOCK: Kelly Clarkson and Former Princess Tessy of Luxembourg discuss Marbury v. Madison and Louis Vuitton’s Keepall 55

What I’d Really Like to Do Is a 12-Episode Single-Camera Mockumentary That Showcases My Comedy Skills

Brainstorming With Andrew Morton and Martin Bashir

Beyond Green Juice

Montecito Solutions to the Housing Crisis (It’s All About Zoning)

Cutting Out the Chelsy Davy Pages From 500,000 Copies of Spare

Suits Reunion Wrap-Up, With NBC4 News Los Angeles Anchor Colleen Williams (confirmed)

How to Talk So Matrimonial Lawyers Will Listen

The People’s Duchess?

Harry’s Content Ideas

Animals

Tall Things and Short Things Ruined by Climate Change

Slacks

Conversations With Obama (if available)

Conversations With Tony Blair (if no Obama)

Conversations With Liz Truss (confirmed)

“Mediocrity”: What Is It and How Do You Spell It?

I Think I’m Still in Love With Chelsy Davy

Are My Bed, Bath & Beyond Coupons Worthless?

I Still Have Chelsy’s Diamond Earrings

If You like Piña Coladas

Trey Parker and Matt Stone Can Bite Me

Chris Martin Acoustic Set (maybe with the pope?)

I’m Trapped

Ukraine: Where Is It?

Can a Listener Please Get Me Out of Here?

Coping With Princess Fucking Michael of Kent

I’m Tired of the Chickens

How to Write a Book By Yourself

I Want to Go Home

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

The values of individualism that encourage us to go it alone are in constant tension with the desire for community that many people crave. But when attempting to do things on our own, we may miss out on the joys of coming together.

This season’s finale conversation features writer Mia Birdsong, who highlights the cultural and philosophical roots of Americans’ struggle to build community. In a culture pushing us to put our own oxygen mask on first, Mia argues for the quiet radicalness of asking for help and showing up for others.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid; the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

Be part of How to Talk to People. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip,” “Just Manners”), Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), and Yonder Dale (“Simple Gestures”).

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Julie, do you remember the first time I approached you in the office?

Julie Beck: [Laughter.] Yes.

Rashid: I sent you a message from behind your desk, saying, “Hi, can I come to your desk?”—while…staring at you sitting at your desk.

Beck: From…let’s be clear…less than 10 feet away.

Rashid: Yes.

Beck: I was like, “Yes, you can?” I remember you being really tentative when you kind of crept up, and I was like, “You don’t have to ask permission to come say hi to me.” And then I was wondering if I looked really unapproachable or something. But I was really excited to meet you, because we’d been working together on Zoom for a while, but it was the first time we’d met in person.

Rashid: I promise that is not my usual approach. I think I just forgot how to human a little bit, and what it felt like to work with people in an office. So I think I thought I was being polite, but I maybe just made it a bit weird.

—

Beck: Hi, I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

—

Rashid: When Julie and I first got together to develop the series—after my awkward desk approach [Chuckle]—we talked a lot about how we wanted the show to explore how small, everyday conversations can become the deeper connections that we want more of in our lives.

Knowing how to talk to people isn’t simply for the sake of starting conversation or fighting through the awkwardness of small talk. The point is to ultimately reach a deeper understanding of the people around us.

Beck: What I’ve always wanted, and what I think so many people long for, is this sense that you are part of a rich, interconnected community. That you have an extended network of support and love, full of many different kinds of relationships that serve many different purposes. And the types of conversations we’ve explored in the podcast so far are the stepping stones that lead up to that.

And now, we’ve arrived at our finale episode. And this is a big one. We’re going to talk about how you build a community, and that can be a really complex concept. The barriers that can make that rich sense of community feel hard to find are not just psychological, within our own minds. There are cultural barriers, too.

Mia Birdsong: The American narrative about freedom—which is deeply individualistic—is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself.

Rashid: Reaching out may be exactly what we need to do to find the community support we need.

Birdsong: I’m just like, Ugh, I can’t figure this out, and I’m like, Duh! Like, ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it.

Beck: Mia Birdsong is the author of a book called How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. In our conversation, she explores how the injustices baked into our country’s history have limited people’s ability to connect with one another, and how we understand the definition of community.

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave, right, was considered unfree, was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Rashid: Mia argues that today, too many people equate freedom with independence, and that can lead us to go it alone when we don’t need to.

Birdsong: And I think we’ve been told, right? The people who are strong—the people who are achieving and are successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own. And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering.

Beck: I think we definitely tell ourselves a lot of stories about how other people must have it more together than we do.

Birdsong: And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person.

Rashid: Mia gets into all of it. She shares real advice about how to ask people for support…without feeling bad about it. And how that can actually bring us together.

—

Beck: Mia, there’s been a lot of research on how lonely Americans are, how disconnected people are from their neighbors. And a lot of people feeling like they don’t have anybody to confide in, even. What do you think is behind all that?

Birdsong: There’s a Harvard study; there’s been a couple of Cigna studies. The BBC did a loneliness experiment, which was a global study. And, you know, Americans are lonely. Loneliness has been increasing, and unsurprisingly, the pandemic made it worse. The BBC study was interesting because it found that loneliness is highest among young people, men, and those who are in an individualistic society—a.k.a., America.

Beck: What is the role that you think individualism plays in all this?

Birdsong: When I think about individualism in America, I connect that very strongly to capitalism—how America defines what success looks like and what it means to be a good person.

And part of what capitalism has done is: It has inserted the exchange of money. I didn’t, you know, get together with a bunch of my friends and build my house. I paid for it.

What’s interesting is that among people who don’t have money, don’t have as much access to money, you see a lot more relational childcare. Like, where your neighbor—or your best friend or your sister or your dad—takes care of your kids. And then that social fabric gets built in, because it’s not a transaction. It is what family does.

And then I think the other piece is that the definition of success is so much about the idea that one can be a self-made man, right? Or pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

So there’s this idea that as an individual, you’re going to work hard, and you’re going to make it on your own—which “invisibilizes” all of the help that people do get. Either from the systems that exist and the privileges and advantages you have, depending on your relationship with that system.

So I think about, you know: People who are born wealthy tend to stay wealthy. If you’re white, if you’re male, if you’re able-bodied, if you’re straight, there are all of these advantages that you end up having.

Beck: And there’s a sense, too, like acknowledging any help that you did get makes your success seem less impressive somehow.

Birdsong: And we think that asking for help is a form of weakness. The more attached you are to this version of what it means to be successful and happy and good, the less you are connected to other humans. Because you’re out there trying to make it on your own.

__

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave was considered unfree was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Beck: Wow.

Birdsong: And it added a whole other layer to how I think about the Black experience in America, from being kidnapped and trafficked from home. And if we think about our people as being not just the human beings around us, but also the land we’re from—our ancestors, right?

Through to: An intrinsic part of the way that America practiced slavery was about the threat or experience of being sold away from your family. To the prison-industrial complex, right?

And through all of that, there’s also been Black people’s resistance to it—from people jumping overboard slave ships because they’re like, I’m going home one way or another. Obviously, people running away from plantations.

After Emancipation there’s this archive where you can look at these online. There were all of these advertisements that we placed in newspapers, trying to find loved ones that we hadn’t seen for decades. Sometimes it was one of our children. Sometimes it was a parent. Sometimes it was, you know, a best friend. Sometimes it was a spouse.

They’re beautiful and heartbreaking, ’cause they’re all very short. But they’re people talking about how they’re looking for somebody and they were sold to this person. So their name might have changed. The limit on the kind of information they had about this loved one—but the determination that they had to find them—was just like…rejection of the ways in which slavery was making Black people unfree. It was this insistence, right?

Beck: And the freedom to reconnect.

Birdsong: Totally. And I think about how many Black folks I know who find out, you know, when they’re an adult that Uncle Bobby is not actually their dad’s brother, but is their dad’s best friend from elementary school.

I have a friend who told me about her and her siblings looking at these family photos and realizing they didn’t know who was chosen family and who was blood or legal family. And then also, ultimately, that it didn’t matter.

And all of that stands in such stark contrast to the American narrative about freedom, which is deeply individualistic. Which is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself. Which means that you need to hoard resources, so that you have everything that you need. You get everything through transaction, so that you don’t owe anybody.

It means you don’t ask for help. It means you’re not responsible for or accountable to anybody. The idea of freedom being you can do whatever the hell you want, and nobody can tell you otherwise, right?

And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person. Because we are fundamentally social animals. Like, we need care, right? And this American idea of freedom is so separated from that.

Beck: So when you say the American-dream narrative is antithetical to freedom, what do you specifically mean by the American-dream narrative?

Birdsong: So when I think about the fundamental ideals that were written into the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and who was articulating that...we had white, straight as far as we know, landowning men. Who represented a minority of the American population.

Women were not considered at all—that’s like half right there. No Black people. No poor people. So when I think about that, and I think about what the American dream is—that’s the ideal, right? And that you do that through working hard, not asking for help. And, you know, you’re amassing your kingdom.

Beck: Mm.

Birdsong: That is not being a person. That is not about being in community. It’s not about caring for others. There’s nothing in there about love. It’s such an existentially central part of the human experience—our pursuit of and desire for and need for love.

—

Beck: Can you tell me about a time your community really showed up for you?

Birdsong: Ooh, yes. In July of 2021, I got diagnosed with colon cancer. And Stage 3 colon cancer. And I was going to have to have surgery and ultimately went through three months of really intensive chemotherapy, very aggressive chemo.

Beck: Ugh.

Birdsong: Yeah, it was no fun. But 20 minutes after I got the news, I had a phone call with my friend Aisha. We were working on a project together, and I was all anxious. Not because I had been told I had cancer, but because I didn’t know when I was going to be able to, like, continue the project.

So I totally got on the phone with her, and I was like, “Girl, I’m so sorry. But I just found out I have cancer, and I have to have surgery. So I’m going to have to postpone my work on this project.” She was like, “Mia.” She was like, “Let’s take a breath.”

And in that breath, I moved from kind of hiding from what was scary about this—behind “I have to get this work done”—to being in this place of being able to feel how afraid I was. But also, like, not alone.

Before we got off the phone, she had the meal train set up that would ultimately make sure that my family got fed while I was in the hospital recovering from surgery, and then for the three months that I was going through chemo.

She then circled up with three other friends of ours. And this group of Black women who called themselves “Mia’s Care Squad” then basically coordinated all of the things with the rest of my community—like, my larger community—that I would need.

They made spreadsheets. They had email chains: a squad of people who would run errands for me. They collected everybody’s advice. So I wasn’t getting bombarded with like, you know, all kinds of advice. But I totally wanted advice, because I was like, “I’ve never had cancer before. I want the advice.”

I feel like there was this way in which they tended to my physical well-being—but they also were tending to my spirit and my heart. They created a “joy fund” for me.

Beck: Oh my gosh; what does that mean?

Birdsong: Which was like a pile of money for me to spend only on things that would bring me joy. I bought a lot of art supplies.

When I was having surgery, there was a group of people outside on the hospital lawn singing for me.

The way that this group came together. And I remember having this moment in the beginning of being like, I am absolutely going to tell my community what’s going on with me. I’m not going to be one of those people who secretly goes through chemo. I’m like, Everybody’s going to know. And I am absolutely asking for their help. I do not want to do this thing by myself.

Beck: What did it feel like to hear your friends singing outside your hospital room?

Birdsong: Well, I couldn’t hear them, because I was in the basement of the hospital having my part of my colon taken out. But I knew that they were there. And I remember as I was getting the anesthesia, holding—because I saw them when I was coming into the hospital.

I remember just holding them in my head. And oh, my God. Because, you know, I was terrified. It was so comforting to know that they were out there singing for me.

So I’ve now been cancer-free for more than a year. And when I look back on that experience, I mean: It sucked. It was terrible. Like, cancer sucks, chemo sucks. But there’s a way in which it wove the fabric of community together tighter for them. I mean—we have shared the spreadsheets with so many other people.

And I know that what my community did has been a model for other people who have also gone through cancer or just, you know, something terrible. I feel so grateful that I got to have that level of love and care, and that I didn’t have any shame about receiving it.

—

Beck: I want to talk more about asking for help and offering help, because I feel like that’s very loaded. Why are so many of us hesitant to ask for help?

Birdsong: I think that, one: We often don’t see people asking for help, so we think everybody else is doing it on their own. Which is a lie. Not only is everybody else doing it on their own, but that it’s easy, right? When in fact, all of us are just a hot mess if we’re doing it on our own. We’re suffering.

Beck: It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Birdsong: Totally. So there’s that piece: that we don’t have a lot of good modeling for it. And I think we’ve been told that the people who have their shit together—the people who are strong, who are achieving and successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own.

And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering. When I was in my 20s and 30s, especially: the way that people would say how they got no sleep and were really tired.

Beck: Yes.

Birdsong: As like, something they were proud of.

Beck: “I worked so much. I’m so busy. My calendar is so full. I’m so tired.” Exactly. Like—congratulations?

Birdsong: Yes. Exactly—that thing, right? That is like, I have suffered in order to be productive. I have suffered in order to achieve. So that there is some way in which we have tied together “suffering and pain” with “being a good person and achievement.” I feel I’m at this place where I’m like, No, I want ease. Just because I can do something by myself doesn’t mean that I should.

I absolutely have to remind myself of this. I often find myself struggling—usually it’s something that I’m thinking about, not so much a task I need to do—but I’m just like, Oh, I can’t figure this out. And I’m like, Duh! Ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it. And inevitably—even if it’s just sharing the anxiety or stress or hardness of the thing—I automatically feel better, just because I’m being witnessed.

Beck: Is there a right way to ask for help?

Birdsong: Well, I’ll tell you what works for me. I often find, generally, that casting a wide net is better, right? Especially if it’s hard to ask for help. Asking one person and them saying “no” means you have to go do it again. When I text my neighbors for a lemon, right, I text all of them. I’m not texting them one at a time. I think the other thing is to tell on yourself and to say.

Beck: To tattle on yourself? [Laughter.]

Birdsong: Yes! To be like: I need help with something. I’m finding it really challenging to ask for help. I don’t want to be a burden. I’m going to do it anyway. And then, ideally, you’re able to have conversations with people, and they can reassure you that you’re not a burden.

I don’t know anybody who is constantly asking for help, that other people are like, Oh my God, Like, stop. That’s not my experience. I feel mostly we don’t ask enough. Maybe practice with things that feel like less of a lift—that don’t feel so critical to you, but that feel like they would bring you some ease.

If you know a friend is going to the store, ask them to pick you up some coffee because they’re going to be there anyway. And then you can go by and get the coffee.

Beck: And if they say no to picking up the coffee, that doesn’t destroy my confidence in the same way.

Birdsong: Totally. Maybe I already have coffee, and I’m just going to pretend I need coffee and see what happens.

Beck: What are your thoughts on the right way to offer help? Because a piece of advice that I hear a lot is that you shouldn’t ask “How can I help?” or “What can I do for you?” Because that’s more stress on the person: to then find something for you to do when maybe they’re in crisis or something.

Birdsong: Right, ’cause it’s not specific.

Beck: And then the advice is: “You should just do something without being asked.” But then, what if that’s unwelcome?

Birdsong: Totally. So this is where I’m also like, we need to stop trying to get an A in asking and offering for help.

Beck: I feel very called out by that.

Birdsong: We’re going to mess it up. I know, all of the high achievers are like, I want to get an A in asking and offering help. I think if we really have no idea what we can offer, we can say to people, “I want to offer some help, and I don’t know what would be useful to you.”

Beck: Mm hmm.

Birdsong: “Do you have an idea about something that would be useful, or is there someone who is close to you who does know what might be useful? And can I talk to them?” We don’t want to offer help that is not useful, because it feels risky.

And I think this is where we have to like, tap into what we know about our loved ones and come up with—here are three things that you could offer, right? And offer those and see if they want any of them. Or do a thing and see what happens. And bring them food. The death of a loved one is not going to be made worse by the fact that you gave them bread and they’re gluten free.

Beck: Small potatoes at that point.

Birdsong: Exactly. When I think about something like a joy fund, right? There’s a kind of imagination that was required to come up with that, that I think is harder in times where we’re all grinding with work and shepherding children and commuting and all of that. There was something about the slowing down of the pandemic. And in my mind, that was the slowing down of the wheel of capitalism that gave people room to show up for me in a particular way.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And I’m saying all of that because—especially right now, like we’re not post-pandemic, but we’re capitalism—the wheel of capitalism has started winding along the way that it was before.

And our mental capacity gets sucked up by, you know, both our paid and unpaid labor. And keeping our lives going. So I want us to give ourselves some grace when we find it challenging to make the space that we need for community.

Beck: Right. Because it’s not entirely our doing.

Birdsong: Exactly.

Rashid: Julie, there was an interesting survey on time use showing that by 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends—which doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time to me. And there was an almost 40 percent decline from five years before that. So, it seems like there’s so much we’re pressured to squeeze into a week or a day that four hours per week is all many people can even manage.

Beck: That was even before the pandemic, too. So I can’t imagine it’s gotten better since. But you’re right, Becca, that time is finite, and life is full of demands. Which is breaking news, I know. I mean: It would be nice to see those stats go up. But also, no matter what, it’s never going to be possible to always be a perfect friend or a perfect neighbor.

Mia said, “You need to stop trying to get an A-plus in helping people.” And I felt very personally roasted by that, because sometimes I do think about community-building as…homework? [Laughter.]

Even though I want to focus on relationships more than personal achievement in my life, those values of hard work and perfectionism follow me into my personal life as well—where if I’m not living up to that ideal of creating a perfect utopian community for me and the people I love, then I’m subconsciously giving myself a bad grade. What a nerd!

Rashid: You’re not a nerd…you’re trying to stay on top of it! I now make it a point on Sunday evenings to kind of write out a list of things I want to do in the next few weeks. And then I try to actually set up social time with my group of friends—I actually started a little neighborhood supper club with my friends, where we do themed dinners every month.

I like that it’s created this routine for us—where I know we have this thing we like doing together, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

Beck: I like that you attend to your correspondences on Sunday night. It’s very Pride and Prejudice of you. [Laughter.]

Beck: So Mia, we’ve been talking a lot about how communities show up for each other in a crisis. And I think most people are really ready to show up in a crisis. But how can we have that kind of interdependence when it’s not a crisis?

Birdsong: Right, because all of us are going to experience crisis. That’s just a given. I have met so many older white men who—their wives die, and they’re in this moment of crisis, and they have nobody. They have their therapist, is who they have. They will just start talking to anybody about what’s going on with them, because they are so lonely.

So I think about that as the opposite of what we want.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And part of it, for them, is that they’ve kind of put all of their social connection in the one basket of their wife. And when that person doesn’t exist anymore, they’re just set adrift.

Beck: So community is, by its nature, something that has to be built by multiple people, of course. But if you are feeling a lack of community in your life, what can you as an individual do to kickstart that process?

Birdsong: So, the advice people get is often to join a thing. And I’m like, that sounds lame in some way. But it’s also totally true. Especially as adults, right? We don’t have that built-in, kind of like a school situation—where we’re meeting people who we know we’re building friendships with.

Beck: Right. We have work.

Birdsong: Exactly. Which I feel is not actually where you should be centering your social life. Because despite what your boss might say, your work is not your family. I mean, people obviously build genuine relationships there, but that should not be your most important social interaction.

So I’m like: book clubs. Activism. If you have some kind of faith, a faith community. Because you’re not going to meet people sitting at home, like I’ve tried.

I think the other piece is that sometimes we know people, but we don’t allow ourselves to be known by them. We’re not having the kinds of conversations that allow people to see into the interior of our lives. We’re not really telling them what’s going on with us. We stick to small talk. Right?

It is a recounting of what happened that was interesting in your life. And, you know, you say that you’re “good” as opposed to what you’re struggling with, or how you’re actually feeling. Or something that you’re wrestling with that could even be, you know, an intellectual thing. It doesn’t have to be painful. But we keep things at this surface level, and we don’t allow things to go deep.

Beck: How do you figure out what you want a community to look like in your life and then bring that into the real world? It seems like a very basic question, but it also seems really hard to actually do it.

Birdsong: Yes. And part of it is to get quiet with yourself. Notice the part of you that is longing for something. And I think, to make some room for it, and to notice how you’re thinking about that part. Like, if it makes you anxious, or if you wish it didn’t exist, or if it’s beautiful in some way to you—sit and find that piece of you. And I think you have to ask it, right? What is it that it wants?

You don’t make a strategic plan for building community. So then it’s really about seeing what that leads you to, and seeing who it leads you to.

I think for many of us, it is like—we have people in our lives, but we want to bring them closer in some way. I think that we actually have more knowledge and wisdom about how to build relationships than we give ourselves credit for. And I think primarily what gets in our way is not “Do we know what to do?” but “Are we willing to do it?”

There is no way to be in close relationships without being seen in some way. And I think many of us—I am “many of us”—are terrified of being known. We want people to see the best version of ourself, because we think that’s the version that people will love. That’s the version that people will praise.

That’s the version that people will want to, you know, be around. But nobody is that version of themselves. We are all many things. Sure, we do good and we do well, but we also mess up and are unsure and insecure and have a hard time.

Beck: I feel like what I’m hearing you say is that if there’s a basic action to community-building, it is “not hiding.”

Birdsong: Totally. Yes.

Rashid: You know, one thing I have noticed ever since the pandemic, Julie, is that most of my socializing is now a lot more homebound, which is not a good or bad thing. Yeah, but: I established a lot of new traditions with my community, like cooking dinner at different people’s houses or movie nights, or things in my life that used to be oriented around going out and meeting at bars.

And that still happens, too. But I have established a sort of newness in the rituals I have with my circle of people. What about you? I mean, have you learned anything in the making of this podcast that has changed your approach to your existing relationships, or helped you build new ones?

Beck: I wish I had a big update for you that would illustrate my personal growth. But I don’t think a lot has really changed with my friends or in my community. I’m not best friends with my neighbors yet. I think what I’ve noticed more is just patterns in how I think about my relationship to my community.

Rashid: I feel like that’s what we’ve set out to do, right? Sort of break down these steps of just bringing people closer to us. The initial awkward small talk, the hanging out, the scheduling the hangouts, the tough communication with friendships, and ultimately the sort of selfless disposition that you need to have if you want your relationships to feel more mutual and not feel transactional.

Beck: I think another hallmark of life in our capitalistic society is the pressure to optimize and self-improve all the time. I fall into that trap of thinking things will be better if I change this or if I change that.

So it kind of strikes me that a lot of my angst comes from feeling like I need to optimize my community toward some ideal through my own hard work—which is actually a very self-centered way to think about it.

The point of a community is that it’s not just in one individual’s control. And as much as it’s good to put effort into your relationships, you also have to just let go and be curious and see what’s actually there, and enjoy what’s there.

Rashid: And I think when you do try to control the situation, you can end up with our messaging-behind-the-desk situation, where before saying “Hi” I thought it was maybe a better idea to message you first, and make sure that you were comfortable with the interaction and all of that.

Beck: But you know, an imperfect awkward beginning like that can actually lead to something great. Because we’ve really become friends while making this podcast! You’ve been to my house; we’ve had many long, rambly, chatty drinks together. You’ve met my partner, you’ve met my sister, you’ve met a bunch of my friends.

Some of that was the result of intentional effort and reaching out and scheduling. But it was also the result of easing up on overthinking, and just being together. So I think it’s a balance of effort and ease—or effort, but not to a neurotic degree.

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Are we moving too fast for America’s national pastime? Hanna Rosin asks staff writer Mark Leibovich whether the changes MLB is making to the game could help him fall in love with baseball all over again.

Interested in the changes baseball’s making? Read Mark’s article on how Moneyball broke baseball — and how the same people who broke it are back, trying to save it.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, first question: Can you just list for me some rituals that baseball players do?

Mark Leibovich: Um, you know, spitting into their hands and rubbing their hands together, staring into space, slapping their chest, Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves, tipping their hat, balancing their hat, looking to the right field grandstand, looking to the left field grandstand, crossing themselves.

They invent new ones all the time. It’s completely dynamic. A pitcher might tug at his cap and wiggle his leg when going into a motion.

Rosin: Do people lick their bats?

Leibovich: Apparently Yasiel Puig does.

Rosin: Eww.

Leibovich: Yeah. But no, I think that’s a pretty rare thing. And sounds unsanitary too.

Rosin: And what do these rituals have to do with baseball?

Leibovich: Nothing, except that they have been there forever—and players have always had rituals. Oh, this is a big part of the problem in baseball. This is why the people in charge have moved to make it faster.

Rosin: That is my friend Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic who gets all the best assignments.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: I’ve known Mark for enough years to see all the fan gear faded. Red Sox hat, Red Sox T-shirts with holes in them. Red Sox socks. I’ve even seen a picture of little Mark at the game with his dad.

Leibovich: Oh my God. The first spring-training game—like, my friends and I would rush home from school to listen to the game on the radio.

Rosin: His love of this game…it was deep.

Leibovich: Every year, my birthday party was all my friends coming, and we would play a game of pickup baseball at the intersection near the little cul-de-sac I grew up on.

But it’s not necessarily like little 7-year-old Mark here. Mean, if you had seen me, I guess I would’ve been in my late 30s. They had these scintillating couple of playoff series where the Red Sox finally came back. I mean, you know, those are some intense sports-watching things.

I mean, this was the culture of my youth, and that is just gone.

Rosin: And is it gone? Because life is just so fast now.

Leibovich: I think that’s part of it. I think baseball has gotten much slower. I mean, games literally took, you know, two and a half hours when I was a kid. Now, you know, as of last year they took three hours, 10 minutes or so.

Rosin: So it’s the two things moving in opposite directions. It’s like: Just as we were speeding up and getting faster, baseball just got slower.

Leibovich: You have these two things moving in opposite directions—baseball getting slower, and our brains getting faster and our attention spans shrinking.

And all of this was moving in a direction antithetical to enjoying baseball.

Rosin: It’s funny;. when you put it that starkly, it actually makes me a little sad. Like we just have no room for anything slow in our busy lives anymore.

Leibovich: Yes. I mean, it’s funny ’cause we have these conversations, and it’s like, “Oh, baseball is to blame. It’s these self-indulgent ritual-doers who are Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves all day.” Maybe this is just our problem. I mean, there are a lot of slow, reflective things we don’t do anymore.

Rosin: So, Mark: When you set out to write about baseball, you thought that the sport was dying. And then, it did something to save itself...maybe. What did baseball do?

Leibovich: They have initiated a set of rules [in Major League Baseball]. One, and most importantly, to make the game go faster. And two: certain rules to make there be more action and offense. Less waiting around in baseball; more fun to watch.

Rosin: Got it. So just like: faster everything. More exciting.

Rosin: What’s one thing they did?

Leibovich: Well, the big thing is a pitch clock.

A pitch clock is a new tool that has appeared in every major-league ballpark this year. In which there’s this big clock in the outfield and also behind home plate—

Rosin: —like a literal clock.

Leibovich: A literal clock. It counts down from 15 seconds.

A pitcher now has 15 seconds to pitch the ball, or 20 seconds if there’s someone on base. And the batter has to be in the box ready to hit by the eight-second mark. So there are only eight seconds left. The batter has to be ready.

Rosin: And what else did they do?

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Bigger bases

Leibovich: One of the things they did was they made the bases bigger, which, you know, people can understand. It’s a bigger base now. What that does is it encourages stolen bases. It makes running bases a safer thing, ’cause you have more of a safe haven to grab onto, or slide into.

They’re reducing pickoff throws, which took forever. And things like that. So they’re encouraging more offense.

Rosin: This isn’t technical baseball language, but it does feel like a real vibe shift.

Leibovich: It very much is. And it’s hard to explain, but when you’re actually watching a game, there is urgency.

Urgency: It is not a word that anyone would ever associate with baseball in recent years.

Now, you sit and you watch—and people are not screwing around. And you sort of internalize that as a viewer or a listener, and you say, “Wait a minute; things are happening faster. I better pay closer attention. I better not check my phone as closely.”

And so the whole vibe is, yes, maybe less relaxing. But ultimately more satisfying, because more is happening, and it’s happening faster.

Rosin: And why did they make all these changes?

Leibovich: Well, part of it is just: Baseball was falling further and further behind things like football and basketball and other sports that are a lot more compelling.

They go much faster and, frankly, are more national spectacles. Like everyone gathers to watch the Super Bowl.

So I actually went to a World Series game last fall between the Phillies and the Astros. And I drove up to Philadelphia. And, you know, it was a World Series game, and it was a no-hitter. The Astros pitchers—four of them—combined to no-hit the Phillies. This was historic, or theoretically it was historic.

No one really noticed. No one remembers it. And this is a World Series game—the likes of which are routinely being outrated on TV by early-season NFL games.

I mean, as our culture speeds up, as brains speed up—you know, cell phones and computers and attention spans. Just the whole culture has sped up. Baseball has slowed down.

And finally, they sort of decided to, all at once, just get very tough and say, “Okay, there is now a clock in baseball.” Lo and behold, it has already shaved 25, maybe 30 minutes off of games in the first couple of months in this season.

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Theo Epstein

Rosin: So. Who is the main architect of speeding baseball up?

Leibovich: There are a few of them. But probably the best known is a guy named Theo Epstein, who is this legendary figure in baseball.

He was the youngest general manager in history. He was named general manager of the Boston Red Sox at age 28. He is known for bringing the first World Series championship to Boston in 86 years. He then left the Red Sox and went to the Chicago Cubs—who had an even longer World Series drought—and he delivered after 108 years.

So he sort of has this legend attached to him. And he left the Cubs a couple of years ago, and he joined Major League Baseball as a consultant.

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Moneyball

Rosin: Isn’t Theo Epstein associated with the whole “Moneyball revolution” in baseball?

Leibovich: Yes. He did not pioneer it. Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s is given credit for that. But Theo Epstein is known as the chief disciple who applied some of these new theories in baseball and actually won World Series with it for the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs.

Rosin: Tell me if this is right. This is what I understand about Moneyball. Okay. I read the book; I saw the movie. So Moneyball was a revolution that, as I recall, was supposed to modernize baseball. Like, instead of tracking one set of statistics about players, they tracked a different set of statistics about players. Which turned out to be the actual critical factors in winning a game, and allowed teams with fewer resources to beat rich, fancy teams.

But also what I understood about Moneyball was that it was supposed to have fixed baseball.

So didn’t we fix baseball?

Leibovich: You know, very interesting terminology here, and we’re gonna try to make it not complicated. It fixed baseball for teams trying to win baseball games—i.e., the Oakland A’s, right? Who have less resources and did more with less.

The innovations we’re seeing now? It’s not about winning baseball games. Because the commissioner of baseball [Rob Manfred] and now Theo Epstein, his consultant—they work for all of baseball. They work for the fans; they work for the interests of entertainment.

So it has nothing to do with a competitive advantage between the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees. It has everything to do with the entertainment attention span of someone watching a Disney movie or playing a video game or watching the Super Bowl or something like that.

Rosin: Moneyball fixed one set of problems, but then created another set of problems.

Leibovich: Well, they created a blueprint for teams to do better with less resources—but it was a terrible thing to watch. I mean, it created more walks, more strikeouts, slower action. So yeah: I mean, it solved one problem. It created any number of problems if you are a consumer of entertainment.

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Mental-Skills Coaching

Rosin: You know, I get why they need to move faster. One of the things that you wrote about from the slow era, which I really appreciate, was this mental-skills coaching. I was surprised and maybe happily surprised to learn that they teach baseball players how to meditate in real time while they’re on the field.

Leibovich: In a sense, yes. I mean, that’s been part of the 21st-century revolution in baseball, and in the service of giving baseball players and teams a slightly better competitive advantage. They have taught mental skills, imaging, little mini-meditations, visualizations, things that you do. Because sports, especially baseball, is a big mind game, right?

You need to put yourself in a very relaxed state, or a state that puts you in a good position to succeed.

Rosin: That seems so nice and enlightened, and that’s what we tell our children to do when they’re stressed out. That’s what we tell everyone. Like, we’re all supposed to slow down and meditate.

Leibovich: Yeah; it might be nice. But it also gets introduced into the culture, which by and large introduces more time and dawdling into the culture of baseball. So David Ortiz, Nomar Garciaparra, Robinson Canó: They have these rituals where they take their deep breaths, and they clap, and they sort of see the field.

And then the owner of the Seattle Mariners told me this: He was teaching his son’s Little League team, and all of a sudden half the Little League team is trying to imitate Robinson Canóby stepping out during the at-bat and doing his little ritual. And so: “Sorry, we gotta wait for Jimmy over here to do his little Robinson Canó–like ritual.”

And then John Stanton, the owner of the Mariners, said to me, “Look, we have just taught an entire generation of kids that it’s okay to pace around the mound for however long and waste all this time.”

And I guarantee you, it would be a lot more interesting to watch Johnny try to dunk like LeBron James or kick a soccer ball like Messi or something than it is Johnny from Seattle trying to imitate Robinson Canó between the 2-and-1 and 2-and-2 pitch.

And so, again, in a very crude way: The pitch clock sort of disrupts all of that all at once.

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Juan Soto

Rosin: You know what: We haven’t talked about how the players feel about all of this.

Leibovich: Hmm.

Rosin: You talked to Padres star player Juan Soto about the pitch clock. Let’s listen to that.

Leibovich: Do you think the clock is a good thing? Like, did the times of the baseball games used to bother you? Or did you ever get impatient, sort of waiting for pitches to come and stuff, just watching a game when you’re playing in it?

Juan Soto: I feel like if you enjoy the games, you gotta give them time to think. And to see, look around and look at everything. I mean: I know for fans sometimes it gets boring. But for baseball players, they will never get bored.

Leibovich: So you were never bored at a baseball game.

Soto: No, never. Never. It’s never too long. It’s never too short. I’m just enjoying the game.

Rosin: What was your impression of what he was saying there?

Leibovich: He was saying like, “Look; this is my life. This is my job. This is what I love to do. I don’t care if you’re bored.” I mean, I’ve had many, many people I interviewed for this story say that a million different ways. Like: “I can’t worry about whether you’re entertained or not. You know, I’m gonna get fired if I lose this many games. Or if my batting average dips below  2.0, whatever.”

No one was saying, “Oh look—the ratings from last night’s game were higher than the night before. Oh, ticket sales are up around baseball. We are being more entertaining.” No one cares about that, huh? Nor should they.

Rosin: So, the players feel one way—and we, the fans, feel another. So I guess that’s why Padres star Manny Machado, in his very first pitch-clock game, was like, “No, thank you.”

After the break: Can Mark learn to love baseball again?

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Rosin: You’ve been to a pitch-clock game.

Leibovich: The first pitch-clock game.

Rosin: Ooh!

Leibovich: Well, the first spring-training pitch-clock game.

Rosin: You were in a box, sitting with all these guys, right?

Leibovich: It wasn’t a box. It was actually a couple of rows up from the field in a spring-training game, with, basically, the orchestrators of this from Major League Baseball. One of them was Theo Epstein. Another guy was Morgan Sword, who is basically the director of on-field operations for Major League Baseball, who has been putting this all in place.

Rosin: And what were you guys talking about?

Leibovich: Well, mostly we were watching the game. I mean, this is like the first day of school for Morgan and Theo. This is this thing they had been envisioning and trying to put in place for months, and even years. And this was the first game in which it was actually happening

Rosin: And were they nervous, like on edge? What was the vibe?

Leibovich: Morgan was extremely nervous. He was a basket case, and usually he’s pretty chill. So yeah, that was pretty glaring.

Rosin: Why was he a basket case?

Leibovich: He was a basket case because he had been thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong. First of all, he’s being scrutinized. Everyone in baseball is watching to see how this first pitch-clock game is gonna go off. But he’s also spent so much time talking to umpires, talking to players, talking to managers, talking to game officials, talking to clock operators. You know, it’s basically starting up a whole cabinet department within baseball that didn’t exist before.

And so obviously on Day One, you’re gonna be nervous.

—

Leibovich: So what’s your experience as a fan been during this interregnum for you? What about your son?

Theo Epstein: Yeah. I mean, my son—my 15-year-old—I can’t help but notice his lack of desire to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour game, really.

Rosin: So who is that?

Leibovich: That was Theo Epstein. He was telling me about what his personal experience is as a baseball fan during this time when he is not affiliated with the team.

Rosin: And he’s saying his son is bored? Like, can’t watch baseball anymore?

Leibovich: Yeah.

Epstein: And especially during the pandemic, I noticed so much of his life existed through gaming. Interacting and doing commerce and everything else, like all through the computer. And Fortnite—it’s like a 10-, 15-minute game. Obviously, it’s a bit of a cliché that the Gen Z generation grew up on their phones.

Leibovich: Yeah. The patience. it’s not a cliché; it’s brain chemistry. It’s real. It is very real.

Rosin: So it’s not just about our attention span. I guess what he is panicking about is that he’s got these sons who should be baseball fans, but they can barely pay attention for more than 10 seconds.

So it makes you feel like the future of the sport is not—

Rosin: Yeah. So this is a multitiered problem, right? So not only are older former fans’ brains adapting to a faster life and moving away from baseball; there’s also this new generation that doesn’t even see what the fuss is about to begin with, and aren’t exactly reading Moneyball and reading George Will columns and watching Field of Dreams to see what the fuss is about.

Rosin: Yes. It’s actually pretty cool that you were present at the creation of new baseball—the new era of baseball.

Leibovich: I’m glad. I’m glad you appreciate this. Because this was a momentous day. And of course it was also a very mundane day, but yeah: It felt momentous.

Rosin: Right. The first-ever game in the new era of baseball. Like, was it more fun? Did you like it? Did time move faster?

Leibovich: So the game was very crisp. It was 3 to 2; I think Seattle won. Basically, all these executives, they were rooting not for the Mariners or the Padres. They were rooting for this game to be very, very fast. ’Cause they knew everyone was looking at this as like, Oh, this is the new baseball. We want it to work.

And yeah, it was very enjoyable.

I was very glad that the game took less than two hours and 30 minutes. I know Theo Epstein was; he wanted to go take a nap. The person to my right wanted to catch a flight back to New York or wherever he was going.

Rosin: So people were living their lives. I gotta catch a flight, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And it fit into their busy lives.

Leibovich: Much more so.

Rosin: Hmm. I can’t really tell if you, Mark Leibovich, were into the game. Like, you know when you’re into a game.

Leibovich: Yeah.

Rosin: Like, I’ve seen you be into a football game.

Leibovich: Yeah. Have you ever seen me be into a baseball game?

Rosin: No.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: You used the word enjoyable? Enjoyable is like a dead word. Were you into the game? Personally, I prefer just fast games; I like watching basketball, I like watching soccer. I want to maybe get on board with faster baseball.

Leibovich: Yes.

Rosin: And so I guess I’m wondering where you are. Like, are you on board with faster baseball? Like when you were there, were you like, Ah, this is gonna work?

Leibovich: Yeah. I saw a minor-league game a few years ago that had a clock, and I was like, Yeah, this is it. This is totally it. I was watching an NBA playoff game with my wife and my daughter Nell, who said, “You know, there’s something really nice about a game that you know is gonna last two hours and 20 minutes.” There’s a clock on the NBA game. And if you’re a soccer fan, it’s gonna take two hours. The commissioner of baseball himself, Rob Manfred, said to me, “Look, what in your life do you really want to do for more than two and a half hours at a shot?” Even people sitting up in the front office, or the commissioner of baseball, would be like: Wow, do we really have to watch this for more than two and a half hours?

Rosin: Yeah. Like the people who are supposed to be…

Leibovich: Management, managers, commissioners. Things like that.

Rosin: I guess I just have to accept that this is where we are now.

Like, we are just not people who have patience for a three-hour pastime. We just don’t have it.

Leibovich: Right. But here’s the thing: Games literally did not take three hours in 1969. They took much less, like two and a half hours. Or probably less than that. I don’t know; maybe people then would have had less patience. But again, these two things are moving in opposite directions.

Rosin: Let’s say we shaved enough time off baseball that it lasted the same amount of time as it did when you were a kid.

Leibovich: Right.

Rosin: Do you think you could ever feel about baseball the same way you felt when you were a kid? Do you actually feel like you could feel the same way?

Leibovich: I mean, look: Can you feel the same way about something as a 50-something-year-old as you did when you were 7 or 8?

I mean, you have a much less mature brain when you’re a kid, for better or for worse. You see the world much more clearly, much more innocently. With much less sense of proportion, and so forth. So, I don’t know, and maybe my fandom growing up is shaped by nostalgia. Now that I think about it and talk about it, I would think so—because right now I associate it with good times for my youth.

Rosin: So it feels like where we are this summer is that we—the fans—really want baseball to change. The players are somewhat resistant. The rules are in place. Do you think that this will save baseball?

Leibovich: I think it will help baseball. I think early results are that it has helped baseball.

If you go by the actual shrinking time of games, if you go by the ratings and the ticket sales and so forth, the first few months of the season have been very encouraging. The larger point is, you know: Is this putting a Band-Aid on a larger sort of existential problem that baseball is ultimately not going to be able to deal with?

Rosin: All right. So now that you’re done with your reporting, and there are no legends inviting you to sit in their boxes with them and talk to Juan Soto, are you gonna go to any games?

Leibovich: Yeah. I mean, again, a lot of it comes down to…

Rosin: Was that like “Yeah,” or was that like “Yes”?

Leibovich: Yes. And I’ll tell you what probably the decider will be. I mean, I’m parochial. I care about my team, the Red Sox. The Red Sox were not supposed to be good this year. They’re kind of mediocre, but they’re an entertaining team, and I have cared about them. So I have watched. If they completely implode, I’ll probably stop watching. So like Juan Soto and him wanting good numbers, I want my team to do well. And I will probably drop off. But if I do go to a game this year, I’m thrilled that it’s not gonna go past 11 o’clock.

Rosin: Right. So it’s love, but it’s conditional love.

Leibovich: Totally.

Rosin: Like, they’ve won you back, but conditionally.

Leibovich: Hundred percent.

Rosin: I think where I’m at is: I still would rather see a Washington Spirit game. But if somebody, say a child—anybody’s child—asks me to go to a game, I won’t recoil in horror. I’ll be like, “Yeah, okay, sure. I’ll try it.”

Leibovich: Here’s what I’ll say to you. And it’s very intimate. But I’m gonna invite you to a game. We both live in Washington, and so we’re gonna go. And whoever wants to join us can join us. And hopefully, the recoiling in horror will not transpire. And if it does, we can just leave.

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Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Our fact-checker is Michelle Ciarrocca. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, Kevin Townsend, Theo Balcomb, and Vann Newkirk. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.

If you like it, tell some Red Sox fans or some Yankees fans; whatever. Tell all the fans.

In 1883, Evert Nymanover, a Swedish scholar at the University of Minnesota, proposed a new invention that some thought would affect the future of humankind: a device that played recordings of books. Nymanover called the device a “whispering machine” and suggested that it could be placed inside of a hat so that someone walking down the street or reclining in bed “could be perpetually listening” to great works of literature.

Though mocked by some, Nymanover’s vision of a book recording in a hat wasn’t entirely far-fetched in 1883. After announcing the invention of the phonograph six years earlier, Thomas Edison turned almost immediately to the device’s implications for literature. He hoped to open a publishing house in New York that would sell novels recorded on six-inch circular plates. “The advantages of such books over those printed,” Edison wrote, “are too readily seen to need mention.” And Edison wasn’t the only one who thought listening to books would be obviously superior to reading. An 1885 essay in the influential British literary magazine The Nineteenth Century maintained that Nymanover’s whispering machine would be a “boon to our poor abused eyes,” and also that when we read print, “one half the power of literature is lost.”

It took a full century, but the technology finally did catch up to Nymanover’s vision of a world in which people could walk down the street listening to books. And yet, by the time portable cassette players became ubiquitous in the 1980s, the mood about listening to books had changed in a way that would have surprised 19th-century audio enthusiasts. Listening to novels no longer seemed like a utopian fantasy at all. To most, it seemed entirely unappealing. In a 1993 Wall Street Journal article on stagnating audiobook sales, one Random House executive lamented that “too many people still think audio books are only for the blind.”

Prominent literary figures tended to be particularly skeptical of listening to books. Strangely, the problem with the audio format was not that it made books less enjoyable. It was the opposite: Audio made books so relaxing and pleasurable that a listener couldn’t engage critically with the text in a way a serious reader should. Listening to literature, the essayist and critic Sven Birkerts argued in his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies, was like “being seduced, or maybe drugged,” a very different experience from “deep reading,” which Birkerts characterized as “the slow and meditative possession of a book.”

According to Matthew Rubery, the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, a fascinating history of the audiobook, the notion that listening to a book is too absorbing to lend itself to deep reflection is the “most enduring critique” of the format. “It was striking to me when I began researching audiobooks how many people in Edison’s time welcomed efforts to make books more entertaining,” Rubery, a literature professor at Queen Mary University of London, told me. “The idea of books needing to be hard work, difficult, and read firsthand in order to be deemed valuable only took hold in the next century.”

That audiobooks have tended to produce anxiety in literary critics is perhaps not surprising. As film and television became the dominant modes of storytelling in the 20th century, book lovers were forced into a defensive crouch, left to argue that the very aspects of reading that made it more rigorous than watching a movie or a show were, in fact, precisely what made reading superior. Audiobooks were suspect because they turned reading into an easier, more passive experience. As the Irish novelist and critic Colm Tóibín once put it, the difference between reading a book and listening to a book was “like the difference between running a marathon and watching a marathon on TV.”

The stigma associated with audiobooks hasn’t gone away since The Wall Street Journal published its 1993 article on audiobooks’ failure to catch on. Daniel T. Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who studies reading, says that the most common question he gets is whether listening to an audiobook for a book club is “cheating.” But if anxiety surrounding audiobooks lingers, it’s no longer stopping Americans from purchasing them. Audiobook sales have seen double-digit increases each year since 2012. Last year, the increase was 10 percent, amounting to $1.8 billion in sales. The trend is only likely to accelerate in the years ahead given that Spotify recently made a major push into the market, and Google and Apple are racing to produce AI-narrated books. (Even the dead can now narrate audiobooks.)

Still, if the audiobook moment has arrived, that doesn’t, of course, mean that all of the concerns about the format have been misplaced. I suspect that listening to a novel truly is less likely to elicit critical engagement. What I’m less sure about is whether that’s such a bad thing.

Like many fans of the format, I turned to audiobooks out of convenience. I was teaching a graduate course on contemporary American writers at Johns Hopkins, and it occurred to me that speeding through audio editions of the novels and memoirs I’d assigned could be a good way to refresh my memories of the books in the days before a class. But, along the way, something happened that surprised me: I started to fall in love with the audio novel. It took me a little while to admit it to myself—I had internalized the stigma so deeply that even entertaining the possibility felt heretical—but, in many cases, I was enjoying the books even more when listening to them.

The next surprise arrived when I began listening to audiobooks in bed. In recent years, I’d been reading much less at night. Exhausted from long days of parenting and emailing and Zooming, I would often end up watching a TV show I was not at all excited to watch rather than reading a book I was genuinely excited to read. Then, one night, I put in my earbuds and downloaded Maggie Gyllenhaal’s wonderful narration of Anna Karenina. Listening to a skilled actor read a literary masterpiece was every bit as blissful as the 19th-century utopians had imagined. “Netflix and chill” became “Tolstoy and chill,” and then “Jane Austen and chill,” “James Baldwin and chill,” “Kafka and chill!”

[Read: An ode to being read to]

Was I being seduced? Was I missing out on the wisdom these great authors had to offer by listening instead of reading? Maybe. There’s not a lot of science on the differences between reading and listening to books. The existing research suggests that adults score the same on reading-comprehension tests whether they read or listen to a passage. But it’s one thing to comprehend a book and another to think deeply about what you’ve comprehended. And Willingham, of the University of Virginia, told me there’s good reason to suspect that reading books does, indeed, lend itself to more intense critical engagement than listening to books does.

In one small study, college students were randomly assigned to either read a 3,330-word article or listen to a 22-minute podcast on a scientific topic. Two days later, when the researchers quizzed the students on the topic, those who had read the article did much better than the podcast listeners.

When you’re reading, Willingham explained, you’re in full control of the pace. You can stop and think before moving ahead. “Audiobooks,” he said, “make that harder to do.” Maryanne Wolf, a literacy scholar at UCLA’s school of education and information studies, likewise told me that although she sees advantages and disadvantages to various different book formats, reading—specifically reading on a printed page—is best for understanding something “at a deeper level.”

Audiobook skeptics are probably right. Listening to a novel will never be a substitute for reading, if the aim is to digest and analyze what we’re reading. Harold Bloom, the late critic and literary scholar, told The New York Times in 2005 that, for “deep reading,” you need the text in front of you in order to engage “the whole cognitive process.” And can we really argue with this? The harder question is whether we truly want to engage “the whole cognitive process” when we read novels or whether we want to be fully immersed in what we’re reading without the interruptions of our own thoughts, no matter how insightful. The harder question, put another way, is whether art should ultimately make us think deeply or feel deeply.

Fiction, which lies at the intersection of style and content, makes this question particularly tricky. There’s the music of the language, and also the concepts and ideas communicated through the music. There’s the story itself, and also all of the signs and symbols beneath it. As the critic James Wood says in How Fiction Works, when it comes to literature, “everything is at once a moral question and a formal one.”

The style and substance of a novel, of course, can never be fully disentangled. Someone who reads with more attention to a novel’s content doesn’t entirely miss out on its music, and someone who is drawn to a novel’s style is still fully capable of thinking about the scope of the book’s ideas. Reading, by allowing us to stop and ponder, might tilt the needle a little more toward content, but listening, by harnessing the emotional power of the human voice, might tilt the needle a little more toward style.

The content of a novel is typically what dominates the discussion, particularly in the classroom, but that might be only because it’s so much easier to talk about. We ask young readers to focus on a book’s themes, to write essays on what this or that image symbolizes, as though a literary work were merely a code containing hidden information. A novel, in the process, is often stripped for parts as opposed to appreciated as a form of entertainment.

Classroom lessons that focus more on style do little to solve this problem. Attention to how a writer makes use of foreshadowing or constructs a particularly brilliant metaphor can’t capture what the novelist and essayist Mary Gaitskill describes as a book’s “inner weave.” She notes that this aspect of the novel is “almost impossible to talk about,” and yet it determines “what the work is about as much as the plot or the theme or even the characters.” Gaitskill compares the inner weave of a novel to “a person’s unconscious.” I think of it as the rhythms of another mind, an animating intelligence that I want to spend time with less because of what it is thinking than the way it is thinking.

[Read: A podcast about the airport best sellers we can’t escape]

This anxiety about overanalysis is hardly new. Nearly 60 years ago, Susan Sontag described “interpretation” as “the revenge of the intellect upon art.” What’s new is the growing popularity of the audiobook and its potential to change the way we approach the novel. Some great filmmakers, Sontag pointed out, had avoided heavy-handed theoretical interpretations of their creations “by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be … just what it is.” Though there is certainly plenty of theory about film, I suspect that a film may be somewhat less susceptible to interpretation than a printed novel not because film is a visual medium but because a film dictates its own pace. When you’re watching a movie, you have little time to stop and think. And though one could repeatedly hit “Pause” when watching at home, few would find it an enjoyable way to experience art.

The true promise of the audiobook, I’ve come to think, may be that it brings the momentum of television and film to literature. By propelling us forward and keeping the intellect a little bit at bay, the audiobook allows the novel, too, to be “just what it is.” Listening is a more passive experience than reading, yes, but, for many, it’s also a more relaxing and pleasurable experience. And the pleasure can’t be overlooked. As the literary critic Laura Miller put it to me, “Why would you even care about allusions or techniques if you don’t actually enjoy novels to begin with?”

Utopian visions don’t often come to fruition. But the 19th-century fantasy whispering machines that could narrate books arrived almost exactly as the futurists predicted—minus, fortunately, having to be placed under our hats. At a moment when fewer and fewer students are choosing to major in English, an unapologetic embrace of audiobooks may be exactly what the literary world needs. After all, the public, as sales figures show, is making its fondness for them clear. Those who love the novel and want our children to love it as well would be wise to listen.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

Are commitment issues impacting our ability to connect with the people who live around us? Relationship-building may involve a commitment to the belief that neighbors are worthy of getting to know.

In this episode of How to Talk to People, author Pete Davis makes the case for building relationships with your neighbors and offers some practical advice for how to take the first steps toward creating a wider community.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid. The managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

We don’t need you to bring along flowers or baked goods to be a part of the How to Talk to People neighborhood. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), and Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Julie, tell me about your relationship with your neighbors.

Julie Beck: In our apartment building, it’s a huge apartment building. It’s basically the size of a whole city block. And there are tons of people there. The only people whose names I even know are my immediate neighbors, because we share a roof patio. Like, I can see them over the fence.

And when they first moved in, I remember my partner and I were gardening on the roof, And I was like, “Joe, we need to introduce ourselves to them.” And he was like, “Nope, we’re not going to.” He was like, “I don’t want to. You can do that.”

We did exchange names and say hi, and that felt like a big victory. However, we immediately thereafter went back to ignoring each other. Every time we see each other on the roof, maybe there’s a small wave—but like, that’s it.

Beck: Hi, I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Beck: It’s really strange to think that neighbors are the people who are literally closest to you, and yet so many of us don’t know them at all.

Pete Davis: You know, I’d walk around town, and I’d walk around the neighborhood and I’d be grumpy that everyone was so cold. And what are people like these days? They weren’t like this when I lived here 10 years ago. [Julie: Laughter.] But then I started practicing, you know? Well: I’m kind of like them, too, because I’m not reaching out to them. You know?

Beck: Pete Davis is a civic advocate and the author of the book Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing. He thinks one reason that neighbors don’t always bother to get to know one another is that our society has commitment issues.

Davis: What I noticed was that all the people that were giving me hope and giving my peers hope had in common was that they were all people who decided to forego a life of keeping their options open and instead make a commitment to a particular thing over the long haul.

Beck: So what does keeping our options open have to do with our sense of feeling like we’re connected to our community? What exactly about committing helps us feel connected?

Davis: You know, I moved back to my hometown after school. And I was gliding on the surface of everything when I moved back—just trying to get a sense of the place again—and I was feeling down on the place. I’m like, Why did we move back? Maybe we shouldn’t have moved back. Am I just moving back because I have this nostalgia? You know, all these things.

You know, when you think about becoming friends with a neighbor, those fears that I mentioned of commitment are fears that are present with you. If I have to commit every Thursday at 7 p.m. to go to this meeting, who knows what I’ll miss out on.

Beck: I do feel like there is a common refrain these days that people just don’t know their neighbors like they used to. Is that true? Was there ever a time when Americans were really good at getting to know their neighbors?

Davis: Yeah; I think it is true. I think, you know, there’s always been a spirit of nostalgia, but we actually have data to show that this type of nostalgia might be correct. The great cite here is Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam: the book that was kind of famous in the early 2000s about the decline of community in America. And he has data set after data set, graph after graph, that show that this is the case.

So “neighbors” in the broad sense of the term—you know, people in your town. You look at any angle on it, and we’re seeing a decline. So between the 1970s and the 1990s, the amount of club meetings that we went to per year was cut in half. The amount of people serving as an officer in a club, the amount of people attending public meetings: all major declines. Membership in religious congregations—it was 75 percent of Americans at the mid-century mark, and now, in the last few years, it crossed under 50 percent, you know?

You look at informal socializing: Putnam was able to find the national picnic data set. Where in the mid-’70s, we went on an average of five picnics a year with our neighbors.

Beck: Oh, my. [Laughter.]

Davis: And that was down to two by the ’90s.

Beck: Bring back picnics! Oh, my God.

Davis: Bring back picnics, and people doing dinner parties. The amount of people that say they have no friends—you know, in 1990, that was only 3 percent of Americans. In 2021, it was 12 percent. And so we do have numbers that show we’re in a neighboring crisis.

Beck: And well, I know we’ve already been talking about this with the spicy picnic data, but can you give us kind of an overview of how Americans’ relationship with their neighbors has evolved in the last 50 years?

Davis: Yeah. There was a famous essay even written back in the ’70s about the early rise of back patios. It was by Richard Thomas. And, you know, the front porch used to be the iconic appendage to a house. And starting in the ’70s and ’80s, interest in back patios started growing and then exploded in the ’90s and 2000s.

And now when you’re watching HGTV, or being toured in a new house or a new build by a realtor, they’re going to talk more about the back patio than the front porch. And both of those are socializing. The difference is the back patio is friends you already know, whereas the front porch is an opportunity to meet the people that start as strangers who live around you and turn them into friends that you know. Which is much less likely if the main socializing area is in the back of your house than in the front of your house.

And because it’s a front porch—maybe you don’t know this person yet. You don’t feel comfortable having them in your house. But we used to design our houses in a way that had this liminal space between kind of stranger and intimate privacy where community is built.

Beck: Maybe also a part of the barrier to talking to our neighbors is that we don’t have a lot of context for them beyond their geographical proximity. Maybe we know that they walk their dog at 8:00 every morning, but we don’t know what kind of person they are a lot of the time.

One thing that’s not given me a great ton of faith in my neighbors is I joined Nextdoor, perhaps misguidedly. And it’s a really tough space—just of people’s fears and worst sides really being on display. It’s just post after post about crime: “I’m afraid of this.” “Watch out for these two young boys that were looking at my house the other day.”

And I think people are often very reasonably wary of interacting with their neighbors in the sense that those people might be coming to those interactions with a lot of biases, unwarranted fears, and assumptions. And racism or sexism, or any of the things that can make our interactions with strangers in public ranging from extremely uncomfortable to dangerous.

Rashid: Right.

Beck: And so I do want to acknowledge that if people have that wariness of their neighbors not treating them as fully human, that is very fair. Simply getting better at talking to people is not going to dissolve racism or sexism or street harassment, or any of those deep-rooted societal problems that infect our relationships with our neighbors. That’s a much bigger problem than just “Do I know my neighbor’s name?”

Davis: I don’t want to be naive with all this messaging that every neighbor is going to be nice. And even among nice neighbors, there’s going to be this layer—just because of the culture that we’re living in—of seeing more, you know, I call it the Ring-camera culture of 2020s America. Where everyone outside your door is someone who’s out to get you, whether it’s a politician trying to get your vote or a door-to-door salesperson.

If that’s your experience of the outside world, because we live in such a low community time, it’s harder to form a community now than it is in a higher-trust society or a higher-trust era. I don’t think it’s something we all have to do alone.

If you’re the type of person that knows three other people in the apartment complex and you’re all friends, you’ve been there a long time and you’re more confident and outgoing and you have less to lose, and you’re less scared of this thing—which doesn’t make you any better, but it’s just like a quality you have—you need to give a little bit of that to everyone else. By being the person who has a little bit more wiggle room to have the vulnerability to lead in breaking the ice.

Beck: Yeah. As it becomes less common for anyone even to knock on your door, then it’s more alarming when someone does. Or you’re just expecting that when you’re at home, you’re going to be left alone.

So how can you build relationships with your neighbors that are as respectfully distant as they need to be, but also can be intimate enough to provide some support?

Davis: There’s a lot of ways to invite people to come be part of your life. So, you know, one of them isn’t knocking—it could be leaving an invitation. That will make them feel comfortable to receive this message and then make an affirmative choice to join or not. No one wants that person who immediately is way too vulnerable and intimate with you.

Beck: You know, Becca, sometimes I feel like there’s this sort of invisible barrier that feels almost physically effortful to push through before you can just say something to a neighbor.

There was a sociologist named Erving Goffman who called that barrier “civil inattention.” And it’s essentially, you know, the default polite posture that we have toward strangers in public. It’s essentially saying I see that you exist, and then you completely withdraw your attention from them and look away and look at your phone and leave them alone.

Rashid: So this is what always happens in the bathroom when you’re both washing your hands.

Beck: Yes, that’s right. The brief eye contact in the mirror, the tight smile. And then you look down and you’re washing your hands very, very solitarily. And that is exactly what happens in my building. Right.

You know, we’re walking down the hall toward each other. We’re looking down. And then there’s a little smile. And then we pass each other, and we don’t speak. That makes me feel like it would be invasive to try to strike up a conversation with them, like we’re both signaling that we want to be left alone.

Rashid: I’m going to tell you a little story about my neighbor who did invade my space.

Beck: Okay. [Laughter.]

Rashid: I’m fine, I’m safe. I was getting into one of two elevators in my building. We have our big moving-your-couch-from-floor-to-floor elevator. And then the small elevator that not more than one person should be getting into at a time.

Beck: And it was the small one, I’m sure.

Rashid: It was, of course, the small one. And he just slightly turned his body and said, “So, you’re a singer.”

[Laughter.]

Beck: Which you are, for the record.

Rashid: I think I am. And I just started profusely apologizing. I was like, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea that my YouTube karaoke was playing that loud, and I was singing over it.”

But it made me extremely self-aware. As you said, someone popped that invisible bubble between us of never acknowledging that we have this relationship, whatever it may be.

Beck: So, do you wish he had just never said anything and continued the sort of fiction that you are just two strangers who know nothing about each other?

Rashid: I mean as much as it was a bit jarring, in the end it was actually kind of nice.

Beck: There is a weird intimacy that we do have with our neighbors, like he can hear what you’re playing through the walls. You share a wall. But if we pass each other, we sort of don’t acknowledge that weird intimacy, or we just pretend that we’re complete strangers with no context of each other.

Davis: Totally. And in some ways, sometimes people are relieved when the intimacy is admitted to, because it pops the tension of it all. You know, I can hear you. I can see you. I saw that you didn’t bring your trash out. Or something, you know, without being nosy. There’s always the—we don’t want uber conformity, and we don’t want invasions of privacy. But there’s something in the middle.

Beck: Yeah. My building, God bless them, they’re always trying to host these community events. So, you know, it’ll be like It’s Valentine’s Day, come down and get some free drinks and cookies. And people will go. And then they’ll just take the food and leave, or they’ll just talk to whoever they live with that they already came down there with. There’s no mixing. They’re not getting people to mix. What are they doing wrong?

Davis: Yeah. You know, we need to have some of these events run by the people themselves. You also have to have an aggressive host, where even though it seems like it’s really annoying to be the host that says, “Hey, I got to know you and I got to know you, so you should talk because you’re both nurses and you both have third-graders. You guys should talk.” You know, that is the type of thing that brings people together. It’s not just automatic of “You lay out Valentine’s Day cookies and everyone’s going to talk,” because you have to have someone that breaks the ice and brings people together.

Beck: Well, this is where I struggle, right? Because I can see how when you first move somewhere, that seems like a natural opportunity to introduce yourself to the people who live next to you or something.

But I’ve lived in my building for two and a half years now. I’ve lived in my neighborhood for almost 10 years, and I feel like it’s too late. I don’t have that excuse of being new anymore. Now so much time has passed that it just feels really weird to randomly try to get something going now.

Davis: You know, it is nice when you just move somewhere that you have this excuse like, “Hi, I just moved here.” And people are going to give you the honeymoon period of that’s not a weird thing to say. That “get out of awkwardness free” card is gone when you’re not.

Beck: Oh yeah, it’s long gone.

Davis: But you know, I’ve always believed that this isn’t something that we need to overthink. You have to just walk up to a neighbor in some way and invite them to be closer to you, which is obviously really awkward. It’s so awkward. That’s the reason we’re all not neighborly with each other.

Beck: Right.

Davis: But everyone is waiting for someone to do that to them. You know, that’s the funny thing. And in some ways, we’re all playing a prisoner’s dilemma with each other where it’s like, I don’t trust them or I don’t trust them to trust me. And they’re thinking in their head, I don’t trust them or I don’t trust them to trust me, or Maybe they don’t trust me or whatever.

And the way to break that prisoner’s dilemma with each other is for someone to go a little bit above and beyond, to have an act of vulnerability. And so a gift is one example of that, which is—“I went out of my way to show you an act of goodwill, to show you not only that I’m trustworthy a little bit more, but also that I think you’re trustworthy a little bit more.”

Mention the concert you went to last weekend when you’re passing in the hallway. Mention something about your family. It doesn’t need to be totally too much information. It can just be the next level of personality.

Beck: You know Becca, even at the most sort of super-benign and cliched neighbor interaction of going over to borrow something, I’ve actually had a negative experience with that myself.

Rashid: Can you tell me what happened?

Beck: Yeah; it was a really simple interaction. I had moved into my current apartment building, and we had all of our taped-up boxes, but I realized that I had packed the scissors inside one of the taped-up boxes, and that I needed scissors to open the taped-up box to get the scissors.

I thought, You know; that’s fine. I’ll just go ask a neighbor. Everybody has scissors. That’s an opportunity to introduce myself and also get something that I need.

So I went down the hall and I knocked on the door that had a light on under it or something, where it seemed like somebody was home. And this very harried woman came to the door, and she had her phone at her ear. And she was like, “What?! What do you need?”

And I was like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I just moved in. I just needed to borrow some scissors. Like, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but do you have scissors?” And she kind of huffed, and then went off and got the scissors.

She did give them to me, but in a very annoyed way. She probably wasn’t expecting a rando to knock on her door in the middle of the day, but I just went and used her scissors and then silently returned them. And then we never spoke again.

Rashid: Did she apologize when you returned the scissors?

Beck: No. She just took them back and just was like, thanks. I think she probably felt sort of interrupted and having her privacy impeded upon. But also I had a very benign request and was met with open hostility. So it did not make me want to knock on more doors, that’s for sure. It was just a reminder: Just because somebody lives near you doesn’t mean they’re going to be neighborly.

Beck: How can you ask a next-door neighbor for help without feeling like you’re an inconvenience?

Davis: You know, the amazing thing is that, with relationships, it all works the opposite of what our fears are telling us, the way that they work. So, you know, you think giving something away means you lose something. But actually, giving something is a gain.

You think that when you reveal something about yourself, it’ll make you hated because people will disagree with the particularities of you., But it actually makes you loved more, and being generic is what alienates you from people.

Beck: One of the things that’s been relieving, but also tough, is that on the one hand, the idea that having that kind of community you want feels so hard is not just your fault for not trying hard enough. Because there’s a lot of institutional things at work.

But then it also feels discouraging, because there’s only so much I as one person can do to change any of that.

Davis: It is none of our faults, and we shouldn’t be accountable. This is not a finger-wagging at individuals to solve this alone. Like, the answer’s just going to be all of us deciding to be nicer and reach out more.

It needs to be a mix of us individually doing that, and rebuilding the civic infrastructure that helps us do it. You know, it’s not just reaching out to your neighbors. It’s reaching out to your neighbors to talk about how we can reach out to our neighbors.

Beck: And what are some things that you’ve done in your life to be committed and stay committed to your neighbors? Do you bring them cookies? What do you do?

Davis: Yeah. You know, we are increasing our gift game.

Beck: Okay, [Laughter.] What’s your best gift?

Davis: We’re mostly doing baked goods and flowers now. And actually, the flowers is a double commitment—which is our local farmer’s market. We’ve become friends with the florist there, and we’re going to go visit the florist at their flower farm soon because we’ve decided to not just treat them as, you know, the person we buy flowers from. And then we bring those flowers to our neighbors and try to have a connection there.

The book that changed my life more than any other is called I and Thou by Martin Buber, who is a Jewish theologian from the early 20th century. He lays out these two ways of relating to the world. He calls them “I and it” and “I and thou,” or “I and you.”

And what “I and it” is: You see everything around you. You see other people, but also the whole world. You see them as objects—its—that have served purposes in your life. Only reflecting what they are to you, how they bother you, or how they help you, how they’re different from you, out there, similar to you.

“I and you” relates to all the rest of the world as “you.” They are fellow subjects. They are also players in the video game of life. They are full of life. They have a depth that you can’t understand. When you really are engaging with them, and you let all of the ways that they measure up or help you or facilitate you or bother you or compare with everything else.

When you let that fall away, you’re bathed in the light of their shared reality with you. They’re also there. And even just a small victory in that fight by building a tiny relationship with one other person isn’t a small thing. It’s everything.

Beck: That’s amazing. [Laughter.] Pete, thank you so much. It was really, really great talking to you and having you on the show.

Davis: Thank you so much. So appreciate what you’re doing with this.

Beck: Yeah, Becca: I appreciated Pete talking about tiny steps and the importance of small relationships.

I think I can get stuck in black-and-white thinking sometimes, where I’m like, Oh, the stakes are really high. Because either my neighbor is going to hate me like the Scissor Lady, or if I just do all the right things, then we’re going to be best buds and we’ll share beers on the roof in the evening. And, as with most things, I think the truth is often somewhere more in the middle.

Rashid: And there’s this concept called Dunbar’s number. The psychologist Robin Dunbar has theorized that people are only able to actually cognitively handle maintaining so many relationships at once—about five deep, intimate friendships at a time. But you can actually handle about 150 or so friendships total in your sort of larger web of the friends of friends, and college friends.

So I feel like neighbors maybe fall into one of those outer rings, where it’s okay that you just sort of know their name and the name of their dog. And, you know, that type of relationship is enough.

Beck: So my very small update on my own neighbor relationship is: The other day I saw those same roof neighbors who we introduced ourselves to like a year ago and then never spoke to again. And I sort of made myself go over there and say, “Hey, you’re so and so and so and so, right?” Like, I remember your names.

I just said, “I wanted to offer, since we share a roof, and it would be really easy if you’re ever out of town and you need us to water your plants, we would be happy to.” And they were like, “Oh great! Like, same! We would be happy to do that, too.” So, we did make that tiny step toward a very small plant-watering relationship.

Beck: It’s actually a lot more than nothing to have someone right next door who’s a little something more than a stranger.

Rashid: I mean, now every time I sing, I know someone is listening. [Laughter.]

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

The end of the Duchess of Sussex's podcast on Spotify is a sign of wider change in the industry.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule next week on a pair of decisions about affirmative action in higher education. Both were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group dedicated to eliminating “race and ethnicity from college admissions.” One case is against Harvard, likely because anything involving Harvard guarantees some attention. The other is against the University of North Carolina, one of the most prestigious public university systems that hasn’t banned affirmative action yet. Both cases involve Asian American plaintiffs, a historically underprivileged minority group and not the usual aggrieved white applicant. This is a detail that has also complicated, and maybe even confused, the picture.

If this conservative Court strikes down affirmative action, which many legal experts expect, the decisions will likely have profound and immediate consequences for many institutions. When Michigan voters banned affirmative action by ballot measure in 2006, Black enrollment at the University of Michigan dropped to 4 percent, in a state that is 13 percent Black. The effects ripple out. Elite institutions produce politicians and doctors and future leaders of all kinds. But as Adam Harris, a longtime education writer for the Atlantic and this week’s Radio Atlantic guest, points out, we’ve lost sight of universities as serving this broader good. Instead, we tend to see them narrowly, as vehicles for individual advancement.

These cases have been kicking around for nearly a decade, and I have followed them loosely. But until this conversation with Harris, I did not realize how hazy I was on some very important questions: how universities have been using affirmative action all these years, and how much groups such as SFFA had co-opted the conversation.

Harris is bracing for next week’s decisions but would not be surprised if the Court eliminates affirmative action. What he clarifies for me in this episode is that affirmative action has been heading in this direction for many decades. Almost as soon as affirmative action became an important tool in the 1960s to redress past racial injustice, it was met with a backlash. The backlash chipped away at the tool until it was just a tiny scalpel. And these latest decisions are potentially the backlash’s final triumph.

“When I think of higher education, it’s a great democratizing way to expand civic good. But if we are put into a position where higher education is no longer able to fill that central role, where higher education grows less diverse, and where those institutions that are feeders for Congress or feeders for the Supreme Court that have the most funding enroll fewer students of color, Black students, Hispanic students, where does that leave us as a country?”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: A lot of attacks on higher-education admissions, particularly at these highly selective institutions, gain traction. And that’s because they’re such black boxes. You think about what these institutions sort of bestowed on students in terms of the prestige that they have on the back end, and the fact that, on the front end, you have this sort of black box in terms of how people get into them.

They’re seats that people want to get to because they know the potential benefits. I mean, all but one of the Supreme Court justices attended either Harvard or Yale’s law school.

Hanna Rosin: I can never get over that. I mean, honestly, I just find that just unbelievable. Like, it’s so specific.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: The Supreme Court is about to issue a set of rulings on affirmative action and higher education. These decisions are a big deal because, if it goes the way we expect, it could change how universities decide who to admit and therefore who gets what kinds of opportunities in life. Like, for example, being a Supreme Court justice.

Now, these cases have been kicking around for almost a decade, and here are the basics. They were brought by a conservative group of activists called Students for Fair Admissions—one against a private university (Harvard) and one against a public university (UNC). The plaintiffs are Asian Americans who say affirmative action is shutting them out, which adds complications. The cases would overturn a 2003 decision allowing some affirmative action, and do away with it for good.

But I realized only recently that I’m a little hazy on some important things, like how universities have been using affirmative action all these years. And how really—no matter what the Supreme Court decides—the backlash against affirmative action already has the upper hand.

So to understand these latest cases, we need to get clear on a pattern that’s been going on since the 1960s. In this episode, we’re gonna talk to Adam Harris, a staff writer who covers higher education for The Atlantic. Hi, Adam.

Harris: Hey, how’s it going?

Rosin: Good. Okay, Adam, so what is the fundamental question the Supreme Court is considering?

Harris: So the big question in this case, which has effectively been the big question in all of the race-conscious-admissions cases, is whether or not institutions can use race in the admission of their students.

Rosin: You know, when I hear that question, I tend to make some assumptions. Like, a basic one is that universities do use race as a deciding factor in admissions and that it’s an important tool for racial justice.

Harris: So, sort of. They use it in a limited way, and they can never use it as the deciding factor. The only rationale allowed by the Court is to increase diversity in the student body, which is very different from trying to atone for a legacy of discrimination. And also some states have already banned the use of affirmative action entirely, like California and Michigan.

Rosin: Which is what the Supreme Court might do nationally.

Harris: Right. And after those states banned affirmative action, we saw the number of Black students enrolled at their universities drop dramatically.

Rosin: You know, I read your book, The State Must Provide, and various other things that you sent me. It was my homework. And mostly what I discovered is that I had fundamentally misunderstood what we talk about when we talk about affirmative action and its connection to racial justice. So one of the things I want to talk to you about is how did we get here? How did we arrive at this point?

Harris: Yeah. So affirmative action or race-conscious admissions kind of first came into the lexicon in the 1960s as a way to fix some of that harm that had been done from legalized segregation in higher education.

If you looked across the landscape, there were all of these really minute ways that institutions had segregated and discriminated against students. In the 1960s and 1970s, institutions started to create programs that would help enhance their Black enrollment. (Typically, it was their Black enrollment.)

And some of this, of course, was under their own volition. And some of this was because in 1965, you got the Higher Education Act; you got some of the civil-rights laws that are effectively saying: If you are a program or anything that is receiving federal funding and you are discriminating against people, you will have that federal funding revoked.

And so they were trying to figure out ways to build out their Black population that they have been keeping down for so long.

Rosin: Okay, so affirmative action began as this civil-rights-era project in all kinds of universities around the country. But I guess the thing that really struck me in doing my homework for this episode about the current Supreme Court cases is that affirmative action, as I understood it—it barely makes it out of that era.

Harris: Yeah, you know, at the time, right, we’ve seen the civil-rights movement, we’ve seen the advances that had been made. And those were met with a, Perhaps we’re going too far into the: We’re discriminating against other people by trying to address this past harm.

Effectively, they’re trying to kill this program in the cradle before it even has a chance to make a dent in that discrimination.

Rosin: So the backlash moment happens pretty much right away, but what happens that kills affirmative action “in the cradle”?

Harris: So what happened is a Supreme Court decision in the 1970s known as Bakke.

Archival [Justice Warren Burger]: First case on today’s calendar is No. 76-811, Regents of the University of California against Bakke.

Harris: So Allan Bakke is a white veteran who is trying to get into medical school. He’s in his early 30s, which at the time people thought was a little bit too old to first enroll in medical school. But he has these credentials that he thinks should really benefit him. He’s effectively worked at a NASA hub for a little bit. And so he applies to several schools, including the University of California Davis’s Medical School.

Archival [Bakke lawyer Reynold Colvin]: From the very beginning of this lawsuit, he stated the case in terms of the fact that he had twice applied … and twice he had been refused ... Both in the years 1973 and in the year 1974.

Rosin: So if he was rejected from all these schools, why does he sue UC Davis?

Harris: So Bakke gets a tip from an insider at the university who tells him: Hey, we have this admissions program that allots 16 seats that were effectively designated for students who were from insular minority groups. And perhaps one of the reasons that you didn’t get into this 100-person class is because of one of those 16 seats.

Rosin: Okay, so it’s October of 1977. Bakke’s case is now before the Supreme Court. How do the justices respond?

Harris: Well, there’s a great moment with Thurgood Marshall, who of course had argued Brown v. Board of Education, and was now a justice on the Court.

Archival [Justice Thurgood Marshall]: Your client did compete for the 84 seats, didn’t he?

Archival [Colvin]: Yes, he did.

Archival [Marshall]: And he lost?

Archival [Colvin]: Yes, he did.

Archival [Marshall]: Now, would your argument be the same if one instead of 16 seats were left open?

Archival [Colvin]: No. Most respectfully, the argument does not turn on the numbers.

Harris: It was one of those times where you almost hear him being sort of sarcastic in his questioning. He’s really needling Bakke’s lawyer and saying, “So it depends on which way you look at it.” And he’s like, “Well, yes, it does.” “It does?”

Archival [Colvin]: The numbers are unimportant. Unimportant. It is the principle of keeping a man out because of his race that is important.

Archival [Marshall]: You’re arguing about keeping somebody out and the other side is arguing by getting somebody in?

Archival [Colvin]: That’s right.

Archival [Marshall]: So it depends on which way you look at it, doesn’t it?

Archival [Colvin]: It depends on which way you look at the problem.

Archival [Marshall]: It does?

Archival [Colvin]: The problem—

Archival [Marshall]: It does?

Archival [Colvin]: If I may finish—

Archival [Marshall]: It does?

Archival [Colvin]: The problem is—

Archival [Marshall]: You’re talking about your client’s rights; don’t these underprivileged people have some rights?

Archival [Colvin]: They certainly have the right—

Archival [Marshall]: The right to eat cake?

Harris: It’s a very: Why are we here arguing about this when just two decades ago, I was before this very Court trying to get students into segregated elementary schools?

Like, we just had this debate. We just had this argument about this historical discrimination and ongoing discrimination. Why are you back in front of me arguing that we’ve gone too far when we’ve only just started?

You know, when Marshall says, “You’re talking about your client’s rights; don’t these underprivileged folks have rights too?,” he’s pointing to all of the different ways that higher education had discriminated against Black people. And so, I think he’s pointing to the fact that there is a harm that needs to be addressed, a past harm that needs to be addressed. And these people should have the rights to have that harm addressed.

Rosin: That’s what he means by “Don’t underprivileged people have some rights?” He’s basically trying to frame a purpose for affirmative action that is redressing past wrongs.

Harris: Exactly. As a remedy for past discrimination.

Rosin: And so where do the justices land? What ends up being the outcome?

Harris: The outcome is sort of a compromise. It’s ultimately what becomes known as the diversity bargain. So, as opposed to the original conception of affirmative action, where they were trying to provide some redress for historical discrimination, this case effectively says: Look, we can’t hold students nowadays—white students nowadays—accountable for what happened in the past and to provide additional seats or to set aside seats for certain classes of students. That would be an impermissible benefit for those students, because it would be harming or potentially alienating those white students who otherwise may have been able to get into it.

And so the Court ultimately says, Look, we do think that it’s important to use race in admissions, because we think that diverse classes are important for the benefit of all students. So the use of race in admissions goes from being a tool to address historical discrimination to ultimately being this sort of amenity that was good for all students on campus. It was good for white students to interact with Black students. It was good for Black students to interact with Hispanic students, right? It was good for the entire student body, as opposed to, you know, accounting for a legacy of discrimination.

Rosin: Interesting. So already, right away, affirmative action has one hand tied behind its back. Like, they don’t ban it outright, but they won’t use it. They won’t let it be used as a tool for racial justice.

It sounds like what they’re saying is that essentially, it has to work for the white students too. Like, it can only exist if it makes the white students’ lives better, which means the backlash kind of won?

Harris: In some sense. It doesn’t sort of wholly say that you have to eliminate the use of race altogether. It’s saying that you can look at race in an admissions process, but only in concert with a host of other factors and never as the factor that decides whether a student gets in or does not.

Rosin: And then what I understood is that over the next many years, in a series of Court cases, the Supreme Court leans in and sort of codifies this diversity bargain.

Harris: Right, the Bakke decision was this very tenuous compromise. It’s not until 2003 that we got a majority of the Supreme Court validating affirmative action. And that comes in a case against the University of Michigan called Grutter v. Bollinger.

Rosin: So the Michigan case is a win for advocates of affirmative action because it settles that as a rationale, but all it actually is doing is confirming the limited diversity bargain that we talked about.

Harris: Exactly. If we think of redress for past discrimination as the entire pie, this case effectively salvaged that little slice of the pie that they actually ended up getting in Bakke.

And you even have Justice Sandra Day O’Connor sort of putting a timeline on the need for the use of race in admissions, effectively saying, 25 years on from the end of this case, it may no longer be necessary to use race in admissions.

Rosin: So it’s like, We’re gonna give you this tiny little tool, and this tiny little tool is gonna solve the problem in 25 years.

Harris: That was the logic of the Court. Exactly.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, when I started off saying I misunderstood something, I think I misunderstood the degree to which my thinking about affirmative action and the role it played in higher education had been colonized by this shrinking. Like, I just am thinking about this in a small box. It’s not even part of the effort to redress past wrongs anymore. And it has not been for a long, long time.

Harris: Exactly.

Rosin: So what did happen? I mean, Sandra Day O’Connor had a vision for what happens 25 years down the road. What happened on the ground in states and in universities?

Harris: So on the ground, you had a couple of different things that happened. Michigan, of course, this was the state that did it. This was the state that protected the use of race in admissions.

And just a couple of years later, Michigan voters ultimately proposed and voted on a ballot measure that would eliminate the use of race in admissions altogether.

And very quickly, we saw what happens when an affirmative-action program goes away. There was a precipitous decline in Black enrollment at the University of Michigan, from around 7 percent, then to around the 4 percent that we regularly see today.

Rosin: I think I’m confused about something. If the Supreme Court ratified it, why were Michigan voters allowed to do that?

Harris: So the Supreme Court effectively just said, you can use, but the voters had the right—

Rosin: But the voters had the right, I see. So the ballot measure is essentially another data point in a history of backlash.

Harris: Yes. Michigan, California, and nine states in total have banned the use of race in admission either through their legislature or through public propositions

Rosin: It’s weird. It’s like a double whammy. Like we still talk about affirmative action as if it’s trying to accomplish the same goals it did in the late 60s. And it never has—

Harris: And it never has. Exactly.

Rosin: So yeah, it’s sort of two hands tied behind its back. You mentioned the numbers dropping at the University of Michigan; so it’s down to 4 percent.

Harris: Yeah, it hovers around 4 percent now.

Rosin: But in a state that is what percent Black?

Harris: Around 13 percent.

Rosin: So it’s well below.

Harris: Well below. And if you look across the landscape at most public flagship institutions, the big institutions in the state—the University of Texas, the University of Michigan, University of Alabama, LSU—most institutions do not come close to meeting its public percentage of high-school graduates in terms of their Black enrollment.

I mean, look at a place like Auburn University. In 1985, Bo Jackson won the Heisman there as the best college football player in the country. That same day, a federal judge said it was the most segregated institution in the state of Alabama.

Fast-forward to today, and they have roughly the same percentage of Black students now. And so the idea that we have around the admissions system, who’s getting in, and how they’re getting in—it’s just very warped.

Rosin: It’s so warped. Listening to you say it, like, how could it have changed? And these cases make it into the news and you have this sense that affirmative action is this incredibly powerful tool that has been transforming universities since the 1960s. And it’s not. It’s like a teeny, tiny little scalpel.

Harris: Yeah. We had a brief period where it was a really aggressive tool, and then after Bakke that sort of went away.

Rosin: I mean, the way you’re talking about it, it feels like we’re rolling backwards.

Harris: In a lot of ways, we are. You know, affirmative action and the use of race in admissions of course has not been perfect. It hasn’t been a remedy for past discrimination in higher ed. But it was a tool to sort of keep things where they were.

If it goes away, there’s a lot of concern that—that tool is now gone. And we know what happens when that tool goes away and we have these precipitous declines.

Rosin: This is a bad place to be, because now we have to contemplate this actual decision that we’re faced with. I mean, one of the pieces of homework you gave me was this conversation you recorded with Lee Bollinger.

For people who don’t know who he is, Bollinger has been the president of Columbia University for the past 20 years, but before that, he was the president of University of Michigan, which is why that 2003 opinion is called Grutter v. Bollinger. Anyway, you guys have this pretty depressing exchange, so I just wanna play it:

Harris: What happens to the texture of America’s most selective higher-education institutions if affirmative action goes away? If they’re no longer allowed to use race in admissions?

Lee Bollinger: So I think we have to imagine what it’s like to go back to a world before affirmative action. There was virtually no ethnic diversity, but no racial diversity. Very few African Americans, and what does that look like in an America we know today?

If our universities—our top universities—have a very small number of African Americans, that says a lot about not attending to it, especially since we spent 50 years really trying to change that, and changing it.

Rosin: Okay, so that brings us back to the cases today. These cases have a slight twist because they involve the rights of Asian Americans, a group that’s also been disenfranchised in certain ways. So it’s not the typical white student that we see in other cases.

Harris: Right, exactly. And that factor of it is something that made people take a second look. This is a case that had some twists and turns because of the ways that admissions officers had portrayed Asian American students in their notes.

Rosin: So does that make you feel differently about these cases than the previous ones we’ve been talking about?

Harris: In some ways it makes you take a closer look at what the actual facts of this case are. And it was interesting because at the district-court trial, there was a lot made of the several different factors that went into a student’s admissions decision.

And one of the big ones that came out of that was the sort of “ALDCs,” right? The athletes, legacies, donors, and children of faculty. And that was really focused on. They really sort of drove at that, the Students for Fair Admissions, as one of the reasons and ways that Asian Americans were sort of left out, and there was a side process, and it was always a question of how you were going to wrap that back to: Okay, are they being discriminated on the basis of their race? Is this because Black students are getting in? Asian American students aren’t getting in? And ultimately, what Harvard is arguing is: Listen, we may have an issue with the way that we have sort of calculated those numbers, but you can view these two things on different tracks. They’re not necessarily connected.

Rosin: I see. So what they’re saying—which it sounds like you agree with—is: Sure, we accept there may be an issue around the admission of Asian American students. There may be issues around the admissions of legacies and very, very many things, but that doesn’t have much to do with affirmative action and Black and brown students. Is that what you’re saying?

Harris: Effectively, yes. They are saying that just because they’re using race in their admissions decision, that is not the thing that is ultimately keeping Asian American students out. Because the ways that you can use race is never as the final thing. So say if you have two students with identical backgrounds, and one student is Black, one student’s Asian American, the university isn’t going to say: Well, we have enough Asian American students. We don’t have enough Black students. And so the Black student’s gonna get put over the top, effectively. There may be issues with the admission system, but that doesn’t have to do with the fact that Black students are getting into the university.

Rosin: Right. Like that side is arguing it very literally. Like Student A, who is Asian, did not get in because Student B, who is Black, did get in. But of course, it’s not like that. There’s a million different factors involved in why anybody does or doesn’t get in, and it’s all really complicated, including how they use race.

Harris: Exactly. So it may have been that, you know, they needed an additional polo player, or maybe they needed an extra tuba, right? The first-chair tuba had graduated and so they needed to replace their tuba player. There are all these different ways that universities are thinking about shaping an admitted class of students that aren’t limited to this sort of, who scored the highest on the SAT or who has the highest GPA.

Rosin: Right. Right. Because one thing I’ve been thinking about is: You’ve talked about a history of backlash. Even if it’s tiny amounts of progress, there’s a sort of solidifying of the diversity rationale, then there’s a backlash against that. And I’m trying to understand if this latest case is just part of that many-decades-long backlash.

Harris: In some ways, yes. The way that higher education is being attacked in this moment—the tenure battles that are going on, the fights to control curriculum—a lot of that backlash stems from this idea of losing out on what is effectively a private good at this point. People don’t think of higher education as: Oh, if this person gets a college degree, it’s good for everybody. It’s: That person got a college degree that’s going to enhance their job prospects. They could be president or, if they go to Harvard Law School, a Supreme Court justice one day.

You know, this case sort of falls squarely into that early-2000s [era of] Brown saying, Hey, we want to study our history and legacy of segregation and discrimination at Brown University. And Harvard’s like, Oh, I want to do the same thing. We’re in a moment where those institutions are finally having to account for that. And at that very moment, you have this attack that may remove one of the tools that has helped to have that enhanced minority enrollment.

Rosin: Okay. Oh, I see. So this is essentially a bookend to the late ’60s. This is a moment when universities, either because it’s been forced on them or because they wanna do it, are doing some racial reckoning, and it’s just at this very moment that it gets shut down. Is that what you’re saying?

Harris: Essentially, yeah.

Rosin: You know, it’s funny, Adam, I know you’ve written about higher education for a long time.

I feel like you care about higher education, like you believe in higher education at some level, right? As what? Like, as a vehicle for what?

Harris: So, George Washington, in his first address before Congress, gets up and he talks about this list of priorities. All of these big things that America absolutely needs.

And included in that is this really interesting paragraph where he says: “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”

Effectively, at the time, they were thinking of ways to build a national character.And that’s George Washington. That’s Benjamin Rush. That’s James Madison. That’s Thomas Jefferson. They were thinking of these different ways to build a national character. And they thought that universities were the way to do that, to build good citizens, because you could teach people to be a citizen in K through 12 or in primary schools.

But they weren’t really grasping it. This was the real place where you would develop those citizens. And at several times of national disruption you’ve had these calls back to, We need to invest more in higher education. With the War of 1812, you already had West Point there, but the federal government says, Okay, we need to give additional money to West Point because this is a good for the public.

The Civil War breaks out and you have the 17 million acres of land doled out during the Morrill Act.

The G.I. Bill, right? All of these big, grand investments in a public good and something that was not only good for the private individual, but good for everyone.

And so when I think of higher education, it’s a great sort of democratizing way to expand one’s sort of civic good.

But if we are put into a position where higher education is no longer able to fill that central role, where higher education grows less diverse, and where those institutions that are feeders for Congress or feeders for the Supreme Court that have the most funding enroll fewer students of color, Black students, Hispanic students, where does that leave us as a country?

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, part of what you’re saying is that we just talk about Harvard, Yale, the sort of elite institutions all the time, but there is this whole other universe of things and people, which represents a much larger number of people than these elite institutions.

Harris: Yes. The majority of students who are enrolled in higher education attend institutions that accept more than 50 percent of their applicants.

And so I think that our understanding of the issues in higher education gets a little bit warped because of the sort of power dynamics of these institutions, right? So you look at the Supreme Court; you say that, Wow, everybody but one person went to these two law schools. And that sort of shapes your perception of higher education generally.When there are millions and millions and millions of students who go to community colleges, who go to public regional institutions who are being well served by these institutions, but that could be better served if these institutions were funded in the same way as the sort of important work they do.

I look at a state like North Carolina, for example. If you are a Black student in North Carolina attending a public college: 23 percent of Black students attend one of the 12 predominantly white, four-year institutions; around 27 percent attend one of the five public HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities]; and around 50 percent attend one of the community colleges in the state.

And so if you’re pushing students out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pushing them out of North Carolina State University, it’s only going to become more important for the state of North Carolina to fund those community colleges that the students are attending, to fund those HBCUs and other public regional institutions that those students are attending.

Rosin: And that’s definitely a good thing. It’s like you divert the attention towards the places where education is actually happening.

Harris: Absolutely.

Rosin: So it’s, you’re saying its utility is that it might reveal a truth. I think what’s hard about that for me is that, I mean, Bollinger himself talked about how frustrated he seemed that, why can’t people connect with this issue? Like, it was so obvious to him as not an activist, but just as the president of Michigan, that universities should play a role in redressing wrongs.

And he banged his head a little bit, like, why, can’t they, why isn’t this obvious to everybody, you know? Yet I feel like you’re still optimistic in saying just this decision will make, you know, people will finally understand.

Harris: You know, in the same way, as I was writing through the book, right, it’s like there have been instance after instance after instance of the ways that institutions have shown and the ways that the courts have shown and the ways that the, you know, states have shown that they were willing to discriminate against Black students in higher education. And that needs to be addressed.

I do have some pessimism about what it would take for the courts to reverse that. You know, because, of course, at the minimum it’s like, okay, you hold on to this little bit of race-conscious admissions that we have, that’s kind of been preventing the dam from just opening, and everything falling apart. But I don’t know. I think that I still have to remain hopeful.

Rosin: I don’t wanna bust your optimism. I feel like you’re temperamentally a hopeful person.

Harris: I am temperamentally hopeful. And I think it’s not necessarily optimism as much as it’s a silver lining. That in some ways this iteration of affirmative action, of race-conscious admissions, that we have is a veil that just sort of obscures the reality of what we have in higher education. It is a veil that has been helpful. But I think a natural system would be something along the lines of what, you know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg says when she was dissenting in Gratz [v. Bollinger]. She effectively says: Wouldn’t it be better for universities just to be honest about what they’re doing and trying to make up for this past harm? So we’re not just sort of dealing in this black-box environment?

I think in that same way, this will show that those gaps in terms of the funding are only going to grow wider. The disparities are only going to get worse in terms of the funding for students. And if that’s not a wake-up call for people, I have a hard time seeing what will be.

Rosin: Yeah.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Theo Balcomb. Our executive producer is Claudine Ebeid. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Our fact-checkers are Sam Fentress and Michelle Ciarocca. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back next Thursday.

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